University of Split,
Faculty of Philosophy (www.ffst.hr)
Radovanova 13, 21000 Split, Croatia
DANICA ŠKARA, PHD
dskara@ffst.hr
LANGUAGE, METAPHOR AND
HUMOUR: PATTERNS OF EXPERIENCE
IN PATTERNS OF LANGUAGE
Introduction
Issues to be considered:
 The relationship between language, metaphor and humour in order to attain a
better understanding of the cognitive patterns of language.
 Cognitive theory is outlined (G. Lakoff, M. Turner, G.Fauconnier, K.
Feyaerts, T. Veale, etc.) and used in humour and metaphor interpretation.
 A limited sample of political metaphors was selected from public media and
relevant databases.
 A number of properties which form the basis for various theories of humour
were explored with special reference to the incongruity theory and language
patterns: schemas, scripts, domains, frames, mental spaces...
 Our starting point is based on the following assumption: ‘Metaphor appears as
the instinctive and necessary act of the mind exploring reality and ordering
experience.’ (J.M. Murry, 1931: 1-2)
‘The mind is a connecting organ..’
Everything we experience is reflected in the brain by neurons
which communicate to form what are called neural
networks.
The brain creates knowledge /understanding of the world.
I.A. Richards, (The Philosophy of Rhetoric , Oxford University Press: New York and London,
1936:125) claims that ‘The mind is a connecting organ, it works only by
connecting and it can connect any two things in an indefinitely large
number of different ways. ‘
ANALOGICAL REASONING


We often use similarity/samenes in our thinking, where even
distant fields may be used to help understand a given frame or
situation.
Dienhart (1999: 98) claims: "Making comparisons is a very human
occupation. We spend our lives comparing one thing to another, and
behaving according to the categorizations we make. Patterns govern our
lives, be they patterns of material culture, or patterns of language.
Growing up in any society involves, in large measure, discovering what
categories are relevant in the particular culture in which we find ourselves.
(...) 'Things' are classified as the same, similar or different, and
we construct mental 'boxes' in which to put objects which 'match' in some
way.

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A fundamental component of analogical
reasoning and of metaphorical
conceptualization is undoubtedly the partial
mapping of a source to a target and the transfer
of inferences and structures that it creates.’
The analogy is guided by a pressure to identify
consistent structural parallels between the roles
in the source and target domain.’ (see Gentner,
1983).
Oppositeness

According to Cruse, D.A. (1986:197) ‘Of all the
relations of sense the semanticists propose, that of
oppositeness is probably the most readily
apprehended by ordinary speakers. (…) Philosophers
and others from Heraclites to Jung have noted the
tendency of things to slip into their opposite states; and
many have remarked on the thin dividing line between
love and hate… ’
Language and mind
The mind is never aimless!

Images of the external world obtained by our bodily
capacities are framed by linguistic patterns/words.
Language can be seen as a repository of world
knowledge, a structured set of meaningful categories
that help us deal with new and old experiences.
Literal and figurative meaning

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The most basic or fundamental level of linguistic
description of reality is that of literal terms. Literal
concepts are those entities whose meanings specify truth
conditions for the objects and events that exist objectively
in the world.
In the traditional analyses, words in literal expressions
denote what they mean according to dictionary usage.
When figurative meanings are interpreted via literal
meanings, there is a confusion in our mind which results
with humour.
kick somebody's ass/butt =
to punish or defeat someone
To rain cats and dogs(=it is raining very hard)
to beat around the bush= to avoid or delay talking
about something embarrassing or unpleasant
Figurative meaning

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Figurative speech is a pervasive imaginative structure in
human understanding of the world (see Lakoff &
Johnson, 1980).
Metaphors allow language to free itself from the function
of direct description and to set up a an indirect
relationship between words and reality.
Reasons: strategically used in order to avoid responsability,
to define complex reality, to manipulate with concepts
(euphemisms), political correctness (vertically challenged,
pushing up daisies, economical with the truth, financially
embarrassed (poor)), comfort women, tottaly dependent (idiot).
The humorous euphemism can help the people facing the
harsh reality with ease.
CONTRADICTIONS, AMBIGUITIES WE
LIVE BY

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Michael Mulkay (1988) claims that people interact with one
another using two basic modes of communication: serious
and humorous
In a serious mode, we attempt to be consistent and coherent,
we seek to avoid ambiguity and contradiction (Grice’s maxims
of communication)
But, complex realities often produce contradictions,
incongruity, which, the serious mode of discourse is unable
to handle easily. Mulkay (1988) defines humour as a way for
people to deal with this multiplicity and inherent
contradictions in their communication. It enables people to
negotiate difficult interpersonal situations.
LANGUAGE ECONOMY
No language can have a separate word for each and
every concept a speaker might wish to convey. It
would be an enormous burden on our memory. In
order to save our mental energy, we often use a word
with an enlarged reference (polysemy).
 Using metaphors becomes an efficient and
economical means of explanation of reality. This is
an example of language economy, or 'economical
percept' (Gibbson, 1966). > we memorize one word
form for multiple meanings.
e.g. The art of taxation is to pluck the goose for the largest
amount of feathers with the smallest amount of hissing.

PATTERNS OF EXPERIENCE IN
PATTERNS OF LANGUAGE

Languages have a tendency to impose structure upon the real
world by treating some distintions as crucial, and ignoring
others. Sometimes the motivation is supplied by
cultural/social norms, rather than by external reality
SCHEMAS, FRAMES, CONCEPTUAL
DOMAINS ...
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Lakoff (Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Lakoff 1987) >
our worldviews are based largely on different patterns,
frames, schemas, concepts, that provide us with
structure for our thinking.
Allport (1954) notes that knowledge is said to be
clustered; we fit our new experiences into one of our
existing categories.
The task of this patterned behaviour is to provide
maximum information with the least cognitive effort.

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A schema is a dynamic mental framework centering
around a specific theme, that helps us to organize
social information (see R.A. Martin:2007). New
information that falls within an individual's schema is
easily remembered.
Frames are not arbitray patterns of knowledge. They
are knowledge units organized around a certain
concept.
Fillmore (1985: 224) notes that ‘a frame represents the
particular organization of knowledge which stands as a
prerequisite to our ability to understand the meanings of the
associated words.’

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In the behaviorism approach, behavioral
scripts are a sequence of expected behaviors
for a given situation.
Mental spaces (Fauconnier, 1994) can be
thought of as temporary containers for relevant
information about a particular domain .

These concepts can be used to explain the nature of
incongruity in humour. If something contradicts our
schema, script it may be encoded or interpreted as an
exception or funny.

Though not all blends are humorous, blending does
seem to be an inherent feature of humor. Koestler
(1964: 51) writes: "The sudden bisociation of an idea
or event with two habitually incompatible matrices
will produce a comic effect, provided that the
narrative, the semantic pipeline, carries the right kind
of emotional tension. ‘
ASSOCIATIVE NETOWORK
 Associative connections between concepts have
different density, therefore the semantic distance
between different scripts, frames can be conceived as
closer or farther.
http://www.brown.edu/Research/Memlab/py47/diagrams/02-Collins-Loftus.jpg
RELEVANT STIMULI

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Schemas are generally thought to have a level of
activation, which can spread among related schemas.
Which schema is selected can depend on factors such
as current activation, accessibility and relevance.
Those schemas and words that are more relevant
(Sperber &Wilson, 1986) in the current context
remain activated; those that least relevant are
suppressed or reduced in activation.

The relevance-theoretic account is based on
Grice’s (Grice 1961, 1989: p. 368-72) central
claims that utterances automatically create
expectations which guide the hearer towards the
speaker’s meaning. Grice described these
expectations in terms of a Co-operative
Principle and maxims of Quality (truthfulness),
Quantity (informativeness), Relation
(relevance) and Manner (clarity) which
speakers are expected to observe.
How Grice’s maxims are violated in political context ’innapropriate relationship with the truth’
 Politicians are the same all over. They promise to build a
bridge even where there is no river. (Nikita Khrushchev)
 He is the cutlery man of politics: born with a silver spoon in
his mouth, speaks with a fork tongue, and knifes his
colleagues in the back.
 In Mexico, an air conditioner is called a 'politician' because it
makes lots of noise but doesn't work well.
 Gordon Brown's budget speech sounded like a blindfolded
man riding a unicycle on the rim of a volcano.
 Margaret Thatcher has the mouth of Marilyn Monroe and the
eyes of Caligula. (François Mitterand)
GRADED SALIENCE
HYPOTHESIS

The choice of activated word frames can be
explained in terms of the graded salience hypothesis
(Giora, 2002). Salience includes senses that are
more frequent, conventional, or prototypical.
METAPHORS
The successful use of metaphor is a matter of perceiving similarities. (Aristotle)

Within a framework of a cognitive approach to
metaphor, it has been described in terms of transfer
from one cognitive domain (source) to another
(target) domain: Life is a battle. People tend to draw
upon experiences in one area of life in order to give
fresh insights and understanding to experiences in
another.
Conceptual metaphors
source
target

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Many scholars agree that metaphors do more than call
our attention to some already existing similarities.
According to Beck, B. (1987, 11) 'They force the mind to
construct a higher-order linkage between the entities referred to'.
Metaphor is not simply the substitution of one concept or image
for another. Instead, it encompasses a complete transformation
whereby two originally distinct meanings are merged so that a new
meaning is effected. ( Edwards, 1997, 29).

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The conceptual blending supported by Turner
and Fauconnier (1995)
They claim that two domains blend into a separate
conceptual space which takes on aspects of both
domains and has an emergent structure of its
own. Conceptual integration—"blending"—is a
general cognitive operation on a par with analogy,
recursion, mental modeling, conceptual
categorization, and framing.
Much of the power of metaphor stems from the
fact that the source and target mental spaces may
belong to superficially very different conceptual
domains.
HUMOUR

The secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no
humor in heaven" [Mark Twain]

So many tangles in life are ultimately hopeless that we have no appropriate sword other than
laughter. (Gordon W. Allport)

Dogs laugh, but they laugh with their tails. What puts man in a higher state of evolution is that he has got his
laugh on the right end. (Max Eastman)

Laughter is an orgasm triggered by the intercourse of sense and
nonsense.
Humour is the tendency of particular cognitive experiences to
provoke laughter and provide amusement. It is one of the
methods that people use to influence each other in a complex
variety of ways. It can be used to push boundaries and rebel
against social norms and taboos, it proveds us with relief
from our tensions that arise from restraint in conforming to
"social requirements.

Humor research deals with a wide variety of issues but many
of them can be categorized according to the major types
of humor theories. Three essential themes are repeatedly
observed in the majority of humour theories:
 Theories of incongruity, inconsistency, contradiction
or bisociation
 Theories of superiority, or criticism, or hostility
(aggressiveness)
 Theoris of release, or relief, or relaxation.


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In recent years a considerable amount of work has been done in
the development of formal theories of humour (N. Norrick
(1986), V. Raskin, (1985), S. Attardo (1994), A. Koestler (1964)).
Many creativity researchers consider humour to be essentially a
type of creativity. Both humour and creativity involve a switch
of perspective. A Koestler (1964) said that creativity involves
bringing together elements of different domains.
Creative thought is a mental process involving the discovery of
new ideas or concepts, or new associations of the existing ideas
or concepts. In order to be creative, you need to be able to view
things from a different perspective.


Arthur Koestler (1964) introduced the term bisociation, i.e.
the specific ‘two-planed’ nature of any creative act. A sudden
bisociation of two incompatible associative contexts, frame
of references causes ‘a sudden jump from one matrix to
another’.
T.C. Veatch (1998) utilizes the established idea that humour
contains two incongruous elements; one element is socially
normal while the other constitutes a violation of the
‘subjective moral order’. If incongruity based humour
theories are on the right track, the vast majority of humour
shared between people must involve, at minimum, two
conceps. (incongruous-congrous).

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Victor Raskin’s script-based semantic theory of humour
identifies a semantic model capable of expressing
incongruities between semantic scripts in verbal humor.
Raskin (1985:99) stated the following:
‘A text can be characterized as a single-joke carrying text if both of the
following conditions are satisfied: (I) the text is compatible fully or in part,
with two different scripts; and (II) ‘the two scripts with which the text is
compatible are opposite in a special sense..’
R. A. Martin (2007: 90) ‘In order for the text to be viewed as humorous
this second, overlapping script must be opposite to the first.’
Script oppositions may be manifested in terms of such pairs as
good-bad, life-death, high-low, clean-dirty, real-unreal, desirableundesirable, etc.
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To induce a shift from one frame to another requires
deliberate use of linguistic strategies and increases the
cognitive demands on audiences.
Humor often turns on an abrupt and unexpected shift
from one frame to another. (Coullson, 2001), e.g.
Tony Blair does the work of two men — Laurel and
Hardy.
Laws are like sausages. It's better not to see how they are
made. (Otto Von Bismark )


Coulson (2001) has proposed a theory in which
two incongruous mental spaces are activated at
once, and resolved in the blend.
A great many philosophers have tried to define
humor in general as a "contrast," or "conflict,"
or "mixture" of desirable with undesirable
qualities.

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It is quite evident that cognitively oriented researchers
generally view some type of incongruity as being a
defining characteristic of humour.
The incongruity theory states that humor is perceived at
the moment of realization of incongruity between a
concept involved in a certain situation and the real objects
thought to be in some relation to the concept.
e.g. I only want your best –
your money.

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Humor arises when one of two opposing scripts
is activated.
real/unreal
human being/animal

A politician is an animal that can sit on the fence
and yet keep both ears to the ground.
man
Animal
monkey
politician=animal/monkey
US president: G.Bush
perfection/imperfection
classical/modern
Linguistic sign: Sound image associated with a ‘wrong’
concept due to the similarity of the two concepts
blowing
sucking


In general, humour is perceived as an interaction of
cognitive, emotional, and social elements. Words
and concepts are used in ways that are surprising,
unusual, and incongruous, activating concepts with
which they are not normally associated.
For a text to be a joke, its final constituent must be
cognitively distant from the prototype , sharing the
least amount of common features with the previouas
constituents.
ON THE SIMILARITY OF
HUMOUR AND FIGURATIVE
SPEECH


1
The deep cognitive similarity between
metaphor and humour is easy to recognize,
and this has actually long been noticed and
discussed by numerous scholars.
Both metaphor and humor seem to refer to
two different but related images or ideas.
METAPHOR:
+
+
metaphor=mapping between domains (target and source) ,
cognitve spaces, frames

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similarity, analogical reasoning, small distance between frames
Novelty, creativity, a switch of perspective , incompatibility with
literal meaning/conventional meaning
Grice’s maxims and graded saliance are not applied in metaphors
HUMOUR
+
_
HUMOUR=mapping between two opposite, incongrous scripts, frames,
schemas or mental spaces. Two juxtaposed concepts stem from
disparate ontological domains, e.g. concrete vs. abstract, inanimate vs.
animate, nonhuman vs. human, with relevant attributes being
transferred from one to the other.


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contradiction, ambiguity, cognitively distant frames, cognitive effort
Violation of the subjective moral order, frames include desirable/undesirable qualities,
real/unreal sitaution, evokes pleasure and laugh (cognitive satisfaction )
Words are used in ways that are surprising, unusual and incongrous
Non conventioanl meaning is activated (violation of Grice’s maxims and the graded
salience theory), novelty and creativity
The distance between the source domain and target domain may be
perceived as the basis of humour. Greater distance, greter incongruity.
POLITICAL HUMOUR
The man is by nature a political animal (Aristotle)
Metaphors play a central role in public discourse, as they shape the
structure of poltical categorization and argumentation.
 The results of the analysis of the sample consisting of 200 political
jokes show the following:
 The most frequent conceptual framework used to define politics and
politicians is animal world (monkey, ass, dog, fox, lion, bull, owl, etc.),
 Symbolic meaning of animals is evoked.
e.g. A politician is an animal that can sit on the fence and yet keep both ears to the
ground.
I like pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals.

(Winston Churchill)

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In general, politicianas are considered to be lyers, irresponsible people,
gamblers, whores, etc.
Note: to play politics=to use a situation or the relationships between people for your own advantage

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Humor and politics have their own frame of reference
Input space 1: Humour=that quality which appeals to
a sense of the ludicrous or absurdly incongruous
Input space 2: Politics= ideas and activities relating to
gaining and using power in a country, city etc.
Blend: incongruous ideas and activities relating to
gaining power
Generic space: irresponsible politics/politicians
Politician=Piano player in a
whorehouse

My choice early in life was either to be a
piano-player in a whorehouse or a politician.
And to tell the truth, there's hardly any
difference. (Harry Truman)
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In Mexico, an air conditioner is called a 'politician' because
it makes lots of noise but doesn't work well.
A politician is an appendix: useless when inert but
dangerous when active.
I regard the law court not as a cathedral, but as a casino.
A politician is an animal that can sit on the fence and yet
keep both ears to the ground.
An election is coming. Universal peace had been declared,
and the foxes have a sincere interest in prolonging the lives
of the poultry. (George Eliot )
The ultra-modern politician is an ink-blot test in which the
electors can read anything they want.
His argument is as thin as the homeopathic soup that was
made by boiling the shadow of a pigeon that had been
starved to death. (Abraham Lincoln)

America:
"We have Barack Obama, Stevie Wonder, Bob
Hope and Johnny Cash."

Croatia:
"We have Ivo Sanader, no wonder, no hope and
no cash.“

You want a friend in Washington? Get a dog.
(H.S.
Truman)

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
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A official Gallup survey polled over women with a
question: Would you sleep with former US president Bill
Clinton?
1% said, ‘No’.
2% said, ‘Yes’
97% said, ‘Never again’
Conclusion
It is not by chance that political, social, ethnic and obscene
themes are statistically prevalent in contemporary jokes.
Political humour is based on the two incompatible associative
contexts, opposing, contradictory frames/scripts. Statistically, the
most frequent source domain is the world of animals, moral
order, games, etc.
Word play is often used, idioms and proverbs often served as a
source of humorous meaning. Different linguistic means are
used to evoke pleasurable concepts.
In politics, the explanatory function of metaphors is often
subjected to the goal of manipulation, which means that
metaphors are often primarily selected for their emotional and
strategic effect, e.g. daizzy cutter, axes of evil, friendly fire, etc.


With the aid of metaphors and humour speakers
render experience intelligible, and by means of
them they adjust to their environment.