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ceptance of the term as a metaphoric vehicle of different tenors. At this point the lexemes (or the lexematic fragments) thrust into forced contiguity acquire a kind of natural kinship and often become mutually substitutable. However, in the pun the metaphoric substitution assumes a particular type of status: vehicles coexist with tenorsfor example, 'Jungfraud messonge': 'Jung' plus 'Freud' plus 'young' plus 'fraud' plus 'Jungfrau'; message plus songe plus mensonge. |
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All the terms present stand in a relationship of mutual substitution. This is the case with 'Minucius Mandrake' and also with a pun such as the one mentioned above: the reading 'young message' replaces 'virginal fraud', and vice versa. Each term is at the same time vehicle and tenor, while the entire pun is a multiple metaphor. At other times the forced coexistence does not imply possible substitution; think, for instance, of 'cawthrick'. A shadow of predicability remains, however, since one term appears to qualify the other (the crow is a trickster himself), and thus it can be said that the pun nevertheless decides the fate of future reciprocal substitution affecting the two terms in a position of forced contiguity. |
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One can object to our discourse that, if Jung and Freud or the crow and the trickster are placed in a position of contiguity, it is because they already stood in a prior analogical (and thus metaphoric) relation to each other. |
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Just as in the quarrel between analogic and digital, the quarrel between metaphor and metonym can generate a flight to infinity, in which one moment establishes the other, and vice versa.
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We can in theory distinguish between two types of puns, in accordance with the reasons that established the contiguity of the terms: |
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contiguity by resemblance of signifiers: for example, 'nightiness' contains 'mightiness' by phonetic analogy ('m/n'); 'slipping' contains, for the same reasons, 'sleep' and 'slip'; |
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contiguity by resemblance of signifieds: 'scherzarade', for the playful analogies between 'scherzo' and 'charade' (sememes in which 'game' would be the archisememe); but it is also true that the origin could lie in the simple phonetic similarity between /cha/ and /za/. One could then ask if the allusion to 'Scheerazade' is born first from the phonetic similarity or from the semantic similarity (the tale of Scheherazade as game and enigma, and so on). |
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As one can see, the two types refer to each other, even as contiguity seems to refer to the instituting resemblance, and vice versa. |
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In truth, though, the force of the pun (and of every successful and inventive metaphor) consists in the fact that prior to it no one had grasped the resemblance. Prior to 'Jungfraud' there was no reason to suspect a relationship between Freud, psychoanalysis, fraud, lie, and |
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