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Metaphor and its humorousness: The case of nominal compounds in German

  • Byongchang Kang

    Byongchang Kang is an HK (“Humanities Korea”) assistant professor at the Semiosis Research Center of Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, Seoul, Republic of Korea. His research interests include discourse structure analysis, cognitive semantics, language–emotion interface, and linguistic humor theory.

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Veröffentlicht/Copyright: 27. Juli 2016
HUMOR
Aus der Zeitschrift HUMOR Band 29 Heft 3

Abstract

This paper discusses the interaction between metaphor and humor by focusing on humorous metaphor-based nominal compounds in German. The paper highlights the lexical level of verbal humor, which has been largely overlooked in the linguistic humor studies. Viewing the nominal compound as one of the smallest units of verbal humor, the present study seeks to distinguish this from discussions of metaphorical humor that are concerned with specific sentence-level constructions. Nominal compounds are simple in terms of structural formation but the two constituents play a complex role in meaning construction, and the complexity increases when metaphor is involved. It is this aspect that has the potential to generate the incongruity required to induce humor. The humor in metaphor-based nominal compounds is produced by the mechanism that creates and resolves the incongruity between the literal and the figurative meaning of the whole compound, supported by a range of meaning construction types of the metaphor-based compound. This study focuses on German nominal compounds that are marked as “humorous” in the dictionary.

About the author

Byongchang Kang

Byongchang Kang is an HK (“Humanities Korea”) assistant professor at the Semiosis Research Center of Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, Seoul, Republic of Korea. His research interests include discourse structure analysis, cognitive semantics, language–emotion interface, and linguistic humor theory.

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by Hankuk University of Foreign Studies Research Fund of 2015.

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Published Online: 2016-7-27
Published in Print: 2016-8-1

©2016 by De Gruyter Mouton

Heruntergeladen am 21.11.2025 von https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/humor-2015-0090/pdf
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