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Article published In:
Linguistic Landscape
Vol. 10:2 (2024) ► pp.166–189

Exploring incongruity and humour in Linguistic Landscapes in Ghana

ORCID logo | Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology
| University of Cape Coast
| University of Health and Allied Sciences
In recent times, Linguistic Landscape (LL) research has been extended to cover several variables, domains, modes, and geo-political contexts. Arguably, humour remains understudied in LL research. This article, therefore, examines incongruities in LLs using a corpus of digital signs and incongruous inscriptions gathered across several mediums in urban Ghana. Drawing on the incongruity theory, we examined the levels of incongruities in the corpus. The study found that incongruities in public signs in urban Ghana manifest at the lexical, grammatical, semantic, and phonological levels. We conclude that the resolutions of these incongruities induce laughter and humour in the audience with the shared sociolinguistic knowledge, and humour intelligence. The findings have implications for the theory on humour and the research on LL.
Keywords: Ghana, Linguistic Landscape, incongruity, humour, laughter
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Concepts and theory
    • 2.1Sociolinguistic situation of Ghana
    • 2.2Multimodality and Linguistic Landscape
    • 2.3Theoretical lens
  • 3.Methodology
    • 3.1Datasets and procedures
  • 4.Results and discussion
    • 4.1Lexical/Orthographic level
    • 4.2Grammatical level
    • 4.3Semantic level of incongruity
    • 4.4Phonological level of incongruity
      • 4.4.1Phonetic approximations
      • 4.4.2Free variation
  • 5.Summary and conclusions
  • References
Published online: 22 September 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ll.22016.ako
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