THE SPECIFICS OF CREATING PUNS IN FRENCH LANGUAGE
This article deals with the study of puns on the basis of French language. In order to support such an approach a corpus of more than five hundred «linguistic jokes» (jokes based on puns) taken from printed and electronic collections has been compiled. We consider the basic grammar, phonetic, lexical language features, which have an influence on the character of pun creation in French joke tradition. We also analyse lexical, grammar and phonetic aspects of the interaction of central variant of French language with its peripheral variants (African, Canadian and internal dialects), that are reflected in French wordplay.