Is That A Pun? Observations on the Perception of Multiple Word Meanings in Latin

David Wharton (University of North Carolina, Greensboro)

Many of the interesting things that go on in literature, such as puns, wordplay, irony, metaphor, and metonymy, depend on words' ability to have more than one meaning. But as anyone knows who has used sophisticated wordplay or a clever pun in the presence of a non-native speaker, such linguistic tricks often go quite unnoticed because of the listener's inability to "get" the joke. And this inability is directly related to the listener's lack of knowledge of, or lack of facility with, the multiple senses of many words.

This commonly-observed state of affairs ought to give us pause as readers of Latin, for very few of us have anything approaching native speaker proficiency in Latin, and though we may try to make up for what we lack in conversational facility by dint of philological labor, that labor is not exactly equivalent to the automatic linguistic reflexes that allow people to produce and appreciate lexical play. And although all of us have had the experience of "getting" a pun in Latin, how do we know that our perceptions of this kind of thing line up with those of a native speaker – is it possible that we are missing much of what goes on in this vein, or, alternatively, that we are perceiving puns where a native speaker would perceive none?

In this paper, I will propose that some of the ways of understanding words with multiple meanings that have been developed in the fields of psycholinguistics and cognitive science can give us useful guidance in trying to discover whether our perceptions are near to those of native Latin speakers.

In particular, I will discuss how the psycholinguistic notions of dominant and subordinate word senses, of semantically balanced and polarized words, and of contextual priming are related to the likelihood of our perceiving multiple word senses (and hence "getting" the pun) in our own language. I will then apply these concepts to several passages of literary Latin, including quotation from Cicero, Lucretius, Vergil, Quintilian, and Servius to illustrate how we can judge the likelihood that a Latin writer is punning.

Select Bibliography

Binder, K. S. 2003. “Sentential and Discourse Topic Effects on Lexical Ambiguity Processing: An Eye Movement Examination.” Memory and Cognition (5): 690-702.

Elston-Güttler, Kerrie E. (2005). "Native and L2 Processing of Homonyms in Sentential Context." Journal of Memory and Language. 52 (2): 256-83 (includes an up-to-date summary of research on sense dominance).

Gernsbacher, M. A.  (1994) Handbook of Psycholinguistics. San Diego : Academic Press

Miyake, A., Just, M. A. and Carpenter, P. A.  1994  “Working Memory Constraints on the Resolution of Lexical Ambiguity: Maintaining Multiple Interpretations in Neutral Contexts.” Journal of Memory and Language 33 (2): 175-202.