Introduction

Abstract

This issue of Lexis apprehends humor in its wider sense, including, for instance, comedy, irony, satire, parody, sarcasm, to name but a few of its many variations. Within this framework, it aims to approach it via the paradigm of lexical creation, meant as a tool used to provoke laughter. Indeed, humorists enjoy playing on words, but also playing with words, which implies a taste for lexical creativity. How are such humorous effects achieved with the lexicon? Derivation, compounding and blending mechanisms, phoneme or letter inversion processes, paronymic neologisms, among many other lexicogenic operations, although revealing the great creativity of their enunciators, obey lexical and morphological rules. If such rules were not followed, they would not work, be efficient and understood by their addressees. The Bergsonian precept [1914: 37], used to describe one of the mechanisms initiating laughter – “something mechanical encrusted on the living” – applies to language indeed: the double tension between creative impulse and linguistic constraints is paramount to the reflections of the thirteen international researchers who have contributed to this thematic issue.