Pun in Japanese Advertisement: Language, Cultural and Communicative Specifics

Abstract

The article dwells upon cultural specific of pun in Japanese advertisement. Indirect communication strategy which includes word play is an essential part of advertising communication. Pun (word play) is considered to be amusing, humorous use of homophones, however, despite humorous effect and ambiguity of pun, pun is not necessary a joke in advertisement. The study is considered to be relevant due to a distinct role of pun in advertisement. About 28% of Japanese TV advertisement is humorous and 12% contains pun. Game, and language game in particular, are considered to be culturally influenced and play important social role. This influence is reflected in using of precedent-related phenomena, idioms, cultural-specific realia. The paper shows that phonetic puns are used more frequently due to abundance of homophones; graphic transposition is also one of frequent types, but Japanese puns in ads do not use Latin alphabet – this is linked to specific of Japanese writing system and language competence; in order to solve a pun communicative competence is required as a large number of puns are created on the basis of linguocultiral and precedent-related phenomena; among jokes in Japanese ads harmless, nonaggressive are prevail that shows specific of Japanese humor and advertising communication. However transformation of linguistic and social standards may cause communicative fail. The object of this research is pun in Japanese advertisement. The principle aims are to reveal cultural specific of pun. As illustrative material pieces of Japanese advertisement and TV commercials were selected via Internet – all of them were published in 2014-2020.