ON THE COGNITIVE-LANGUAGE BASICS OF HUMOR AND WAYS OF ITS CREATION

Abstract

The relevance of the topic of the article lies in the absence of a holistic definition of the concept of “humor” and the incompleteness of the presentation of the methods of its creation in the scientific literature. The article highlights the most important properties of humor, on this basis to formulate its general definition and describe productive techniques and methods of creating humor in colloquial, artistic and journalistic discourses. The results contribute to the theory and practice of humorology: they reveal the cognitive-linguistic basics and the main features of humor, its role and functions in communication and human life. It is shown that humor has the properties of innate and biosocial nature, specificity, some illogicality of its content, the ability to give participants in communication pleasure and a positive mood, the opportunity that allows them to feel their superiority over someone else, etc. The article describes various methods and means of creating humor, providing an integral unity of its features. Such productive methods of generating humorous works as the following are described: animalizing characters, exaggerating actions, objects and their properties, using a hyperonym instead of a hyponym and a hyponym instead of a hyperonym, transferring a gradual decrease or increase in the properties of an object in size, pseudo-contrast, strengthening a weak thesis by logical its development, expression of differences of preference, redirection of names, etc. Some of these tools first became the subject of study in humorology. Humor is understood by us as a cognitive-speech formation, containing a slight alogism, contradiction or riddle, corresponding to the natural peculiarity of a person, to cause a simple short-term positive emotion in the consciousness and behavior of communication participants, giving pleasure from the consciousness of one’s superiority over others, manifested in the form smiles, laughter and laughter and therefore serves as an important means of obtaining psychophysical relaxation and positive interpersonal communication.