Abstract
Despite the repeated call for humor research, few attempts have been made to address humorous metaphors in diplomatic discourse. This paper examined each type of strategic humor behind these metaphors in Chinese diplomatic discourse from the perspective of cognitive pragmatics. Blending theory, metaphorical mapping, and inferential structure between source and target domain were examined to construe the implicature behind humorous metaphors in digital diplomacy, press conferences, and presidential speeches. We found: (1) multimodal resources can add more value to metaphor inference in digital diplomacy, especially with blending theory; (2) many offensive metaphors of PATIENT, PERFORMANCE have been attributed to the US and its allies.
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