The culture of humour consolidates universal values. Healthy laughter helps to sublimate positive energy. One can qualify laughter as an embodiment of the personal attitude to the world. In this study, we proposed to consider rather rare jocular Spanish paremias - wellerisms and dialogisms - and to determine under which form of humor it is possible to subsume them. Spanish dialogisms and wellerisms or “humorous paremias”, as famous Spanish phraseologist J. Sevilla Munoz named them, have repeatedly attracted the attention of linguists; but according to another Spanish researcher P. Orero Clavero, they only briefly mention these paremiological units and do not describe their structural and semantic features in detail. Taking into account the definition of wellerisms by Spanish lexicologist J. Casares as “comical dialogisms”, we classified wellerisms as their subgroup and found structural variation of the dialogisms much more diverse than of the wellerisms. The analysis took into account the classification of speech situations in these Spanish paremias, proposed by N. Med. The theory of speech acts, the foundations of which the English philosopher J. Austin had developed, was also important for this study. We examined more than 70 similar in structure paremiological units, identified a number of speech situations of their use and distinguished the main ways to achieve a comic effect. We also determined that the main function of these paremias was not moralizing, which was more typical for paremias in general, but an entertaining one. Considering Spanish dialogisms and wellerisms in the context of the theory of illocutionary acts developed by American philosopher J. Searle, we included them in the category of expressive speech acts. These show the internal state of the speaker and their emotional evaluation of a situation by means of comedy.
Translated title of the contributionREFLEXION OF THE CULTURE OF HUMOUR IN SPANISH PAREMIAS
Original languageRussian
Pages (from-to)84-87
JournalНовое искусствознание
Issue number1
StatePublished - 2018

ID: 42735970