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Metaphor and Metonymy:
The Cognitive Trump-Cards of Linguistic Humour
1. Introduction
Language is perhaps the dominant medium of humorous expression. Verbal humour
is, of course, linguistic by definition, but even visual humour in the form of cartoons
can often derive its meaning from an underlying linguistic expression such as a
conventional metaphor or idiom. The language of humour ranges from the immediacy
of bodily form and function, it all its sensory, sexual and scatological glory, to the
sublime reaches of abstract thought. To adequately capture this range in a theory of
humour, one needs a linguistic framework that recognizes these end-points and
everything in between as forming a genuine spectrum of inter-related concepts, as
opposed to a collection of arbitrary content domains that are each formally equivalent
at an abstract level. Cognitive linguistics is one such framework, viewing language
not as a separate mental module but as a highly-grounded and experiential facet of
general human intelligence that is tightly and inseparably integrated with other key
facets of behaviour, such as conceptual reasoning, spatial and temporal awareness,
visual processing and motor-processing. This disdain for modularity means that
cognitive linguistics cannot offer a clinical, autonomous theory of any one facet of
linguistic cognition without necessarily drawing upon every other facet. But in this
rejection of modularity lies great descriptive power: a theory of linguistic humour can
draw upon every such facet with ease, crossing functional boundaries as needed and
allowing the interpretation and generation processes to view each component of
meaning (lexical, semantic and pragmatic) as re-entrant and available at every level of
linguistic analysis.
Of course, not all linguistic humour needs this kind of flexibility of processing and
integration of cognitive faculties. But the fact that some kinds do, and draw their
humour directly from this power, suggests that to the extent that language is
represented at all in a theory of humour, it should be considered from a cognitive
vantage-point. In this paper we consider a kind of humour that is found most often in
concise verbal witticisms as opposed to narrative jokes, which exploits conceptual