LINGUISTIC DEVIATIONS IN COMEDY: INCONGRUITY IN SPEECH ACTS

Language use, albeit mostly unconsciously, consists of ‘choices’ in all levels of language from ‘phoneme’ to ‘context’. Through these linguistic choices, which enable ‘communication’ both to be established and to be analysed, the same event can be narrated in many different ways. A writer or a speaker structures his/her text through choices s/he makes from different levels of language, and thus s/he shapes the way how to comprehend and analyse the text. The style of comedy plays is also shaped by the choices comedy writers make from different levels of language in such a way that they generate laughter in audience. Especially ‘linguistic deviations’ which occur in choices made at the level of ‘pragmatics’ constitute the basis for the language of comedy. Within the context of this paper, ‘speech act principles’ at pragmatic level and ‘deviations’ from these principles in texts will be discussed, and the way how these deviations are employed in comedy texts will be explained through several examples from various literatures.