Remarks about the linguistic humor in Norwid’s letters

Abstract

Humor, especially linguistic humor present in Norwid’s numerous texts, has not yet been the subject of meticulous study in the works on Norwid. What is more, in many studies it is emphasized that the categories of humor and comedy are almost absent from Norwid’s works. However, reading the poet’s writings with special attention paid to these two categories, reveals Norwid’s new image, as in many texts written throughout his life he expressed his undoubted sense of humor many times and in various ways. Also in his letters numerous examples may be found of the humorous side of people joined with situational and linguistic humor. His linguistic humor uses a lot of various mechanisms; in the poet’s letters inflectional, lexical (humorous neologisms, the use of polysemy, homonymy and paronomasia), phraseological and stylistic (based mainly on contrast and concentration) humor may be found. It should also be added that Norwid’s humor not only has the ludic, but cognitive and axiological character as well.