Embodied Grammar and Humor

Cognitive Linguistics is an approach to the study of language and the mind. Among its main foci are (1) what sorts of knowledge language users have about the form-meaning pairings of their language, and (2) how language use interacts with other cognitive mechanisms, like perception and action systems. In this paper, we survey two lines of Cognitive Linguistic research into how language is represented and processed, relevant to these two areas of interest: the pragmatics associated with particular sentence patterns and the role language plays in cueing visual and motor imagery. Neither has previously been extended to the study of language for the purpose of humor, but we demonstrate the relevance of each to understanding how linguistically conveyed humor works. More broadly, we argue that the use of language for humor is best understood in terms of theories in which linguistic knowledge arises from embodied experiences plus linguistic input, and in which language is interpreted by activating embodied world knowledge. Such theories provide useful insights into cognitive mechanisms used during humor production and understanding, like conceptual metaphor and frame-based knowledge. The upshot is that humor research both supports and is supported by an embodied theory of language. (197 words