Understanding humorous metaphors in the foreign language: a state-of-the-art review

Humor is not only a highly valuable tool for pedagogical purposes, it can also help language learners increase their feeling of engagement in everyday communication in the target culture (cf. Lee 2006). However, the understanding of humor in a foreign language (L2) requires the use of a great deal of knowledge that goes far beyond the mastery of mere linguistic features of the target language. It requires the use of specialized sociocultural knowledge (e.g. the use of political satire, local sights and sounds, historical references) and to some extent the creative elaboration of figurative meaning. In this context, it is quite surprising that cross-cultural humor research so far has neglected the contribution of conceptual metaphors as a mean to create humorous language. Therefore, the present article explores the theoretical and empirical interconnections between cross-cultural humor research and cognitive linguistic research on metaphor and shows some directions for future research on the comprehension of humorous metaphors in the L2