Dark, but Danish: Ethnopragmatic perspectives on black humor

Carsten Levisen

doi:10.1515/ip-2018-0018

Dark, but Danish: Ethnopragmatic perspectives on black humor

Intercultural Pragmatics ◽

10.1515/ip-2018-0018 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 15 (4) ◽

pp. 515-531 ◽

Cited By ~ 5

Author(s):

Carsten Levisen

Keyword(s):

Comparative Perspective ◽

Sense Making ◽

Main Function ◽

Discursive Practices ◽

Black Humor

Abstract This paper explores sort humor ‘black humor’, a key concept in Danish conversational humor. Sort forms part of a larger class of Danish synesthetic humor metaphors that includes other categories such as tør ‘dry’, syg ‘sick’, and fed ‘fat’. Taking an ethnopragmatic perspective on humor discourse, it is argued that such constructs function as a local catalogue for socially recognized laughing practices. The aim of the paper is to provide a semantic explication for sort humor and explore the discursive practices associated with the concept. From a comparative perspective, it is demonstrated that the Danish conceptualization of “blackness” differs from that of l’humour noir, a category of French surrealism, and English black humor with its off-limit topics such as death and handicap. In Danish discourse, sort humor has come to stand for a practice of collaborative jocular non-sense making. It is further argued that the main function of sort humor is to establish or enhance a feeling of “groupy togetherness”.

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CZY JESTEŚMY GOTOWI NA EKOGLOTTODYDAKTYKĘ W POLSKIM KONTEKŚCIE EDUKACYJNYM?

Neofilolog ◽

10.14746/n.2020.55.1.2 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 11-26

Author(s):

Jolanta Sujecka-Zając

Keyword(s):

Foreign Language ◽

English Language ◽

Sense Making ◽

Main Function ◽

Important Place ◽

Nature And Culture ◽

Language Environment ◽

Language Context ◽

The Relationship

The trend for eco-linguistics, which has been dynamically developing in the English-language literature since the 1970s, proposes a change in the perception of the relationship between language, nature, and culture, in a sense making language a link which brings together nature and culture, rather than separating them as is traditional. This approach poses important questions: How do languages work in the ecosystem created by the language environment of all users of a given language context? What relationships can they enter into? How should one perceive the development of multilingualism in such an ecological approach, in which not only does "strong" affect the "weak" but “weak” reciprocates? "Weak" has an important place in the language ecosystem, which risks serious changes due to excessive weakening of one of its components. This paper aims to examine the possible inspirations that eco-linguistics offers Foreign Language Teaching (FLT), highlighting the role of each language and sensitizing the reader to the relationships that arise between languages and their users in a given environment. From this perspective Claire Kramsch (2008) postulates a change in the perception of the main function of the teacher from the "teacher of a code" to the "teacher of meaning", which has specific didactic consequences in how language activities are approached. Is the school classroom a place for activities which have their origin in the trend for eco-FLT?

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Irresistible empire or innocents abroad? American advertising agencies in post-war Italy, 1950s-1970s

Journal of Historical Research in Marketing ◽

10.1108/jhrm-08-2013-0050 ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 7 (1) ◽

pp. 7-30 ◽

Cited By ~ 7

Author(s):

Ferdinando Fasce ◽

Elisabetta Bini

Keyword(s):

Design Methodology ◽

Empirical Investigation ◽

Comparative Perspective ◽

Discursive Practices ◽

Advertising Agencies ◽

Content Type ◽

History Of ◽

Post War

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the presence and influence of US advertising in Italy between the early 1950s and the mid-1970s. Design/methodology/approach – The purpose of this paper is to examine the presence and influence of US advertising in Italy between the early 1950s and the mid-1970s. Findings – The paper argues that there is a need to further qualify and deconstruct the notion of “Americanization” by integrating the now well-established notions of “hybridization” and “mediation” with more specific attention to the competing “hearts and souls”, the different strategies and discursive practices that different individual actors (American, British and Italian) operating within the Italian advertising business tried to instil into goods and consumers and the economic and cultural results that they achieved. Originality/value – This is the first research on the history of Italian advertising that fully places it within a transnational and comparative perspective using so far unpublished records, aiming at moving beyond traditional, eastbound Americanization frameworks through a detailed empirical investigation.

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Impossible Puzzle Films: Between Art Cinema and (Post-)Classical Narration

Impossible Puzzle Films ◽

10.3366/edinburgh/9781474406727.003.0006 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Miklós Kiss ◽

Steven Willemsen

Keyword(s):

Meaning Making ◽

Comparative Perspective ◽

Sense Making ◽

Art Cinema ◽

Narrative Mode

Chapter 5 discusses the formal make-up of impossible puzzle films, asking how they regulate viewer responses to their excessive complexities. This section addresses two specific questions: ‘How do impossible puzzle films cue certain sense-making and meaning-making operations over others?’ and ‘How do they keep viewers hooked on trying to solve their ultimately unsolvable puzzles?’. In line with these questions, part of the chapter is dedicated to a comparative perspective on the storytelling mode of impossible puzzle films and that of (modernist) art cinema. Art cinema, as a narrative mode, has used complex means similar to its contemporary counterpart, but, as the chapter demonstrates, has generally done so to different ends. The section argues that impossible puzzle films draw from both the tradition of (modernist) art-cinema and classical narration, but remain fundamentally rooted in the latter by carefully balancing their pervasive complexities with more classical elements of mainstream film storytelling.

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