Monolingual and Multilingual Wordplay in the Linguistic Landscape of Basel: A Study on Wordplay in Terms of Linguistic Techniques, Ambiguity and Multilingualism

This paper documents and analyses wordplay in the linguistic landscape of Basel, Switzerland. It focusses on wordplay in signs, which range from advertisement billboards to shop windows, collected by walking through the city of Basel and capturing signs with a camera. For the purpose of understanding the intricate dynamics of wordplay on signs, these wordplays were submitted to various levels of analysis. This analysis focussed on the different building blocks used to create and purvey wordplay and humour by, firstly, looking at the application of different linguistic techniques, as defined by Thaler (2016). In a further step, these linguistic techniques were examined according to whether or not they made use of ambiguity to create wordplay, this was accomplished by referring to Lew's (1997) taxonomy of ambiguity. The influence of multilingualism in combination with the aforementioned tools is also explored in this paper. This, in turn, provides an in-depth analysis of different linguistic aspects involved in the creation of a wordplay in the linguistic landscape of Basel. The results found the use of sixteen out of the twenty linguistic wordplay techniques as defined by Thaler (2016). These were comprised of a balanced distribution of 6 ambiguous and 6 non-ambiguous techniques, the other 4 techniques were found to use both. As for the wordplay-focussed linguistic landscape, more monolingual signs and technique occurrences were found than multilingual. In conclusion, this paper has provided an innovative structured analysis of wordplay in the linguistic landscape of Basel by combining several layers of analysis.
Keywords: linguistic landscape, Basel, taxonomy of ambiguity, linguistic techniques of wordplay, University of Basel