TRANSLATING ARISTOPHANES’ PUNS

Aristophanes on Tragedy

Fifty years before Aristotle wrote his Poetics, Aristophanes had devoted two comedies, Thesmophoriazusae (411) and Frogs (405), to the subject of tragedy. In both plays the plot shows the education of the main character in the nature of tragedy. Euripides learns in Thesmophoriazusae that he must present noble and not base women in his dramas. His depiction of perverse women in the theatre had m...

The Ionian at Aristophanes

Computational Model of Puns

Humor plays an essential role in human interactions. Precisely what makes something funny, however, remains elusive. While research on natural language understanding has made significant advancements in recent years, there has been little direct integration of humor research with computational models of language understanding. In this paper, we propose two information-theoretic measures—ambigui...

Speculations on Story Puns

There is a class of joke which consists of an anecdote , which is sometimes quite long and often has no inherently humorous content, followed by a punchline which is a distorted form of some well-known phrase, proverb or quotation. Usually the punchline purports to summarise or draw a moral from the preceding story. This genre has some unusual aspects, from the viewpoint of conventional claims ...

Puns for Contextualists

In this paper, I will first try to provide a new argument in favour of the contextualist position on the semantics/pragmatics divide. I will argue that many puns, notably multi-stable ones, cannot be dealt with in the non-contextualist way, i.e., as displaying a phenomenon that effectively involves wide context, the concrete situation of discourse, yet only in a pre-, or at least inter-, semant...