Abstract

Over the last three decades, the paths of humor research and Cognitive Linguistics have crossed on a regular basis and in different ways. This can be attributed to a number of reasons, including a shared epistemological basis of the leading linguistic humor theories and Cognitive Linguistics (henceforth CL), the central interest of CL in the cognitive operations driving language (including the classical cases of figurative language), and the inclusion of cognitive linguistic concepts in recent humor-theoretical work. In what follows, we will briefly go into each of these reasons before presenting a more extensive overview of the contribution of CL to humor research.