Varmint5000

Some articles on Humor theory:

The Cognitive Linguistics of Scalar Humor
BENJAMIN BERGEN AND KIM BINSTED

...humorous language study allows us to consider these issues in the context of truly creative language use.
Linguistic creativity has been central to linguistics since Chomsky (e.g. 1965), who identified creativity as a central component of linguistic competence (see also more recently Hauser et al. 2002). However, most linguistic studies, if at all interested in creativity, restrict this to grammatical creativity, which can be defined as the ability to put together existing structures in new ways, such that the product is grammatical utterances (i.e. grammatical competence). Grammatical creativity yields grammatical utterances, as in
(22) below

Magnanimous purple theories gallop tepidly.

Of course, grammatical creativity is only a part of the actual creative capacity humans demonstrate when using language. Contrasted with the ability to put together known pieces to form new wholes is the ability to select an existing structure to be meaningfully used in a new context (Di Pietro 1976). This can be identified as selectional creativity.

But the ability to produce and interpret combinatorially novel utterances in novel situations, which is what language users who engage in the production and understanding of scalar humor are doing, involves both the grammatical and the selectional capacities. This combined, full creativity is the ability to produce and interpret an entirely novel utterance such that it is appropriate (Cairns and Cairns 1976). The full creativity of scalar humor makes use of constructional pragmatics, along with other domain-general mechanisms like imagery and metaphor. These same mechanisms are responsible for creating the humorous effect of scalar humor utterances, by evoking an incoherence and allowing it to be resolved. By way of conclusion, here are some morals to be drawn from the present work. Generative creativity is only part of the human capacity for creative language use. Interestingly, full creativity seems to be the product of constrained and structured principles that make use of general purpose cognitive mechanisms. This illustrates the importance of the embodiment of the human language system – only when embedded in a larger cognitive and physical context are predominantly linguistic capacities able to function.

Creattive Language System Group: The Science of Humor