Phraseological deautomatization and verbal humor in Spanish

Abstract

Sayings, common phrases, and routine formulas are pluriverbal lexical units (Corpas Pastor, 1996) which show greater fixation and idiomaticity. This makes them an ideal framework to insert breaks of expectation. This article deals with a set of deautomated sayings, that is, subjected to variation, rupture, or deviation, for humorous purposes. Within the framework of the theories of analysis of verbal humor we take the most recent extensions and applications to Spanish of the General Theory of Verbal Humor (Raskin & Attardo, 1991; Attardo, 2020) by Ruiz Gurillo (2019). We analyze the procedures used to deautomatize some sayings in English and Spanish: the order of the constituents, variation of the grammatical category, modification of the number of elements, substitution of components (Montoro, 2005). For the analysis of the deautomation of sayings, the works of Veyrat Rigat (2008), Luque (2008), García Yelo (2012) and Illán Castillo (2021) are considered. Common patterns are observed in the types of rupture in the linguistic sphere that confirm the thesis of Corpas Pastor (1996: 29): the more fixed the phraseological unity, the more feasible it is that it would be modified in the discourse.