Linguistic games in contemporary Lithuanian folklore

A unifying quality of the analyzed games involves a certain deviation from the linguistic norm, resulting in the comic effect. Following the rule that addressee is also involved in the linguistic game, these games serve as means of verifying the extent to which the listener or reader is competent in the linguistic system, knows the traditions of usage and recognizes the deviations. Depending on the genre, the required quality of the addressee’s linguistic competence can be higher or lowerThe subject of the article comprises linguistic games recorded in Lithuanian folklore in the course of the last two decades. The study is restricted to investigation of three genre corpuses: i.e. nicknames, humorous dictionaries and anecdotes. The samples selected for analysis have linguistic game as the main organizing principle of the whole text or of some distinctive textual structure. By selecting different folklore corpuses as subjects of investigation, it was sought to reveal the different rules of the linguistic game typical to each of them. The nicknames are most clearly based on phonetic game. A peculiar rule of this game consists of the organizing role attributed to the consonant p, which particularly often emerges in the beginning of nicknames, both meaningful and meaningless ones. In the humorous dictionaries, the main principle of the game includes imitation of the structure of explanatory dictionaries. New meanings are invented chiefly in three ways: by playing with the seeming polysemous character of the word, the seeming homonymy and by subjective interpretations of words and phrases, which are frequently metaphoric and relevant just in certain contexts. The game form established in anecdotes is the verbal duel, in which the chief rule of the game involves contrasting meanings of words or phrases, caused by one of the duel participants misunderstanding the figurative meaning or actualizing another literal meaning, or etymologizing in a peculiar way, creating different word combinations, etc. Having summarized various examples it is possible to assert that in verbal duels, clashes between linguistic and empiric worlds are rather frequent