The functioning of humorous utterances in modern language (a case-study of Woody Allen's works)

The article discussed the functioning of humorous utterances in modern language. Literary (essays) and cinematic works by Woody Allen as a vivid representative of the American humorous tradition of the 20th-21st centuries served as the material for the study. The novelty of the research consists in commenting on humorous utterances using a comprehensive approach, which includes the analysis of the cognitive and cultural base of an utterance, its communicative, discursive and linguistic features. It is shown that humorous utterances cannot be considered outside the trichotomy «consciousness, communication, speech”. It is emphasized that the latter can simultaneously realize the functions of communication, information and impact. The relevance of the article is determined by the fact that this type of utterance is characterized by a special correlation between the content plane and the expression plane, since it is intended to extract a particular reaction of the reader / listener - laughter. It is shown that idiomaticity and stylistic accuracy based on the creative use of linguistic means are typical for humorous utterances, due to their functional orientation. Particular attention is paid to structural features: it is argued that modern humorous utterances can be both monomodal (verbal) and multimodal (video-verbal) by nature.