INTERFERENCE OF FRENCH LEXICAL UNITS AS THE MEANS OF COMISM IN AMERICAN COMEDY FILM DISCOURSE

Abstract

The article focuses its attention on the research of lingostylistic peculiarities of American comedy film discourse. The conducted research reveals a number of comic stylistic means connected with the interference of French lexical units and word combinations into American comic discourse. Among the most frequent code mixing devices we could single out the following 1) French is sexy; 2) occasional metaphors, which contain such ethnonyms as ‘French’ or ‘Francais’, like French living, French laugh, French kiss, etc; 3) occasional comic words, which represent blend words containing such etnonyms as ‘Francais’ or ‘French’, like Franfrog, Frandship, Francaholic, etc; 4) combined stylistic means including French loan words and some stylistic devices, for example paraprosdokian (an unexpected end of a sentence); 5) some kind of parody, where one of the characters parodies some French speaking person such as Jacques Yves Cousteau and some others. The number of French American code mixing options, as well as other combined tropes and figures variants, leading to a comic effect, is not limited by those mentioned in the analysis, so the perspective of the American comic discourse study is the further disclosure, classification and codification of all American humor mechanisms. The appearance of new variants of the classic stylistic figures, utilized in the comedy film discourse, and their codification, is a present day phenomenon of the American communicative space.