Blending as a fundamental mechanism of human creativity within language. On conceptual integration theory in English humour analysis

Abstract

According to Fauconnier and Turner, human conceptualisation is based around the process referred to as conceptual integration, aka blending. How it works is basically that language users, or rather their brains, tend to pick and mix selective elements of diverse mental spaces (or input spaces) as a base for novel meaning creation, which is resultant from the blend of such inputs. Thus, language creativity and originality hinges on the blending of correspondences that are mapped onto one another in order to come up with a third new quality that has not existed in language before, as it would seem. In my paper, I would like to display how cognitive integration processes operate in regard of humour within language. Further, I would like to prove that blending may well be considered a fundamental prerequisite for creativity with recourse to the comic use of language.