Implied Meaning In Language

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Introduction Implied Meaning is communicating an idea or feeling without saying it directly. According to Taguchi, “What is important about implied meaning, is understanding what the speaker intends to accomplish in making an utterance” (2005, p. 543). In other words, implied meaning is what the writer/speaker decodes to the reader/listener and how they interpret it based on several factors such as culture, knowledge, linguistic knowledge, contextual clues and its relevance to the readers. The main purpose of this research is to define how implied meaning is used in puns. Thus, the thesis will mainly discuss how implied meaning is used in puns and how it is manifested by providing several examples and methodologies used in puns. General information…show more content…
Moreover, a pun is defined as a sentence or utterance in which "the same sentence appears to offer two independent meanings, but in reality there are two different sentences made up of different words, but claiming to be one and the same because both have the same sound. It is a way of using the characteristics of the language(s) to cause a word, a sentence to involve two or more different meanings (Augarde, 2003). Thus, humorous effects of puns are not only on “same sentence which offers two independent meaning”, it mainly depends on structural ambiguity. To elaborate further, pun is mainly structural ambiguity used in implied meaning especially in puns which changes its structural meaning. For instance, among the structurally ambiguous lines attributed to Groucho Marx, "Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana" and "I shot an elephant in my pajamas. The ambiguity involving the word flies has two different meaning, since the difference in the two meanings also changes how the structure of the utterance is interpreted. It is thus a structural ambiguity. The second example is also a structural ambiguity as the prepositional phrase "in my pajamas" may modify or describe either the preceding verb or noun phrase (Oaks,…show more content…
Lexical ambiguity may result from homonyms, words spelt and pronounced in the same way but have different meanings, as well as from homophones, words pronounced in the same way but have different meanings or spelling (Giorgadze, 2014). For instance, # 1 pun; “Two peanuts walk into a bar, and one was a-salted”, the pun is mainly homophone and homonym, since, the word “a-salted” is actually “assaulted”. Another example of # 2 pun, “A bicycle can't stand on its own because it is two-tired”, this example also represents homophones, homonym and also polysemy, since, “two-tired” is “two-tiered”. Thus, lexical-semantic ambiguity is clearly seen on the basis of polysemy, homonyms and
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