Appreciation of purposive ambiguity : the relevance of puns in city promotional slogans

Abstract

The chapter reports on an empirical study involving 61 native speakers of Polish con-ducted to establish to what extent the presence or absence of a pun in a city promotional slogan affects the audience’s perception of the slogan’s appeal. The findings that emerged were used to test the predictions that follow from Sperber and Wilson’s (1986/1995) relevance-theoretic model of utterance comprehension, namely that utterances may be judged as more or less appealing depending on the extent to which they meet or fall short of the interpreters’ expectations of rel-evance. The results confirmed the observations that puns constitute an important factor affecting the appeal of a city slogan. They also demonstrated the explanatory powers of the relevance-theoretic tools in predicting pun-related phenomena.