A Cognitive Approach to Literary Humour Devices: Translating Raymond Chandler

Abstract This paper explores ‘Marlovian wisecracks’ in Raymond Chandler’s early texts and their translations into Greek. Source texts and target texts are analyzed using the GTVH (Attardo 1994, 2001), which provides a sound linguistic framework allowing for a comparison of humorous texts. In addition, cognitive linguistic insights are adopted (particularly from Fillmore and Kay’s forthcoming work on Construction Grammar) as it is suggested here that for the purposes of translation research we can benefit from a cognitively based, fine-grained analysis emphasizing idiomaticity. Shifts attested in the target texts are explained in terms of (a) encoding or decoding idiomaticity and conventionalized meanings of constructions, and (b) different humour traditions or repertoires (Toury 1997) in the two languages. A tentative hypothesis is presented relating the suggested motivation for observed shifts to processing effort, which has been shown to impact on humour appreciation (Attardo et al. 1994).