The power of metonymy in humour: stretching contiguous relations across different layers of meaning

Abstract

This paper is grounded in Cognitive Linguistics (CL), which sees metonymy as a conceptual phenomenon, in which one conceptual entity (the source) provides mental access to another entity (the target) within the same conceptual domain (Radden & Kövecses 1999), as opposed to metaphor, which is seen as a mapping between different domains (Lakoff 1987

Rhetorical strategies in Chinese and English talk show humor: a comparative analysis

“…Meanwhile, Veale (2013) emphasized that humorous descriptions are disguised as similes at times—many structural and semantic features that reflect the characteristic of poetic similes are present in humorous similes although none of those appear to be necessary or sufficient to make a simile creative and humorously creative, but many often mark irony or ridicule with a semantic imprecision marker, such as “about.” Therefore, Veale (2013) argued that humorous similes exhibit all the hallmarks of verbal humor, from language ambiguity to expectation violation and suitable incongruity—this proves the critical role of similes in humor. Tabacaru and Feyaerts (2016) attempted to clarify the ability of metonymy to produce humorous impact by stretching its various layers of meaning to justify its power to produce humor. In a more recent study, Godioli and Little (2022) found that satire and exaggeration are often expressed together in courts to produce humor.…”

Humor creation during efforts to find humorous cognitive reappraisals of threatening situations

“…In the introductory section we already described metonymy as a contiguity-based conceptual mechanism of reference-point reasoning, which operates within the borders of a single conceptual domain (Langacker 1993;Radden and Kövecses 1999;Feyaerts 1999Feyaerts , 2003Koch 1999;Peirsman and Geeraerts 2006;Tabacaru and Feyaerts 2016). In contrast to the mainstream cognitive linguistic view, we regard the often cited criterion of just one knowledge domain being involved as an epiphenomenon of the contiguity relation, which includes associative-functional relationships such as cause-effect, container-contained, producer-product, part-whole, substance-object, etc.…”

“…Since this process of reinterpretation as it shapes the cognitive reappraisal ideas classified as humor is by no means fundamentally different from any other process of meaning extension, we hypothesized that most of the cases of humorous reappraisal would involve at least one of the common mechanisms of semantic construal (Croft and Cruse 2004 ): metaphor, metonymy, and polysemy. More specifically, based on previous linguistic research findings regarding the principles of spontaneous humor creation (Feyaerts 2013 ), we expected that especially metonymy would manifest itself as the most prominent semantic mechanism underlying the generation of humorous cognitive reappraisals (Feyaerts and Brône 2005 ; Tabacaru and Feyaerts 2016 ).…”

“…Fourthly, to further evaluate the effectiveness of these mechanisms in humor creation, their use was correlated with humor creation performance on the level of the individual. We expected that the use of metonymy in particular, which is a potent tool to build relationships between conceptual entities that are incongruous at first sight, may enhance the quality of humor creation (Tabacaru and Feyaerts 2016 ). The identification of these various relevant linguistic mechanisms provides a realistic, empirically substantiated account of the internal semantic relationships along whose lines humorous reappraisals can be construed.…”

Why are you amused: Unveiling multimodal humor from the prototype theoretical perspective

“…The elements come from different domains and there is a likelihood that they may be incongruous to one another and thus result in the creation of humorous effect (Tsakona 2009(Tsakona : 1180. Moreover, more CL underpinnings such as conceptual metonymy theory (e.g., Tabacaru & Feyaerts 2016), salience and conceptual blending theory have also found application in revealing humour mechanisms (see Brône et al 2006 for a more detailed discussion). In a nutshell, while CL opens up new perspectives for humour research, the inclusion of humour as an object of CL studies has also benefited the discipline.…”