Edited by Augusto Soares da Silva
[Figurative Thought and Language 11] 2021
► pp. 357–386
Lexical items with a ludic potential have not been systematically studied up to now. The aim of this paper is thus to explore sources of humor in the French and Italian lexicon and to investigate to what extent the notion of incongruity can explain the humorous effects and ludic usage of lexical items. Incongruity will be reinterpreted from a usage-based perspective, stressing the interactional dimension of communication (see also Kotthoff, 1998; Onysko, 2016), which defines the relative inappropriateness and pragmatic markedness of the items. In addition, the semantic distance and (in)compatibility of the meanings as well as the semiotic nature of the relevant reference entities will be taken into account, and a typology of relevant subtypes of incongruity will be proposed.