For the Linguistic Conceptualization of Social Humor

Abstract

Humor plays an important role in people's lives, which helps them to communicate and share their feelings and thoughts among each other. Jokes and various humorous utterances are a form of communication that is constantly shared in the process of social interaction. That is why humor is, to some extent, recognized as a social phenomenon.Since humor covers all areas, social media is no exception, as the latter is the most powerful tool of communication in the modern global world. People joke almost on everything despite difficult socio-economic circumstances and pandemic is no exception.The main goal of our research was to observe and analyze the so-called pandemic-related posts on social networks, particularly Facebook and to make their thematic and linguistic analysis. COVID 19 posts turned out to be quite diverse and very interesting. The observation has revealed that most of the posts on the social network concern the family relationships that are full of humor or sarcasm. This is not so surprising as people were forced to be locked in a family environment, That’s why numerous examples of this type have been gathered around this very topic. Interesting materials on educational and travel topics were also found during the study.Linguistic analysis of texts from social media, more precisely identification and analysis of the linguistic and literary means of expression, appeared to be very interesting.The research has revealed that various stylistic means such as repetition (parallel constriction), metaphors, comparison/simile, metonymy etc. are frequently used for constructing COVID 19 texts in social media. Thus, the analyzed examples are very interesting material from a psycho-linguistic point of view.