THE CULTURAL ORIGINS OF RIDDLES have eluded scholars and remain almost as impenetrable an enigma as the question of how operate in a culture. The two problems are, in fact, intertwined, and those of us preoccupied with the latter must inevitably delve into the former. In this essay we shall draw upon the operation of grammatically-based as we have previously described it in order to examine the cultural categories underlying such and to relate underlying cognitive processes to surface acts in riddling (Green and Pepicello 1978, 1979; Pepicello 1980). We begin our investigation with the consideration of a central notion in riddling, that of the the element which impedes solution of the riddle question. Beginning with the work of Robert Petsch (1899), the notion of the block element has been central to studies of the riddle. The structural analysis of the riddle form put forth by Petsch includes five basic elements: an introductory frame, a denominative kernel, a descriptive kernel, the block or distractor element, and a concluding frame. This framework has been revised and refined in numerous ways. William Bascom (1949), for example, expands upon Petsch's model in his attempts to define the syntactic patterns in Yoruba and to explain variations in both grammatically and culturally. In a later work Robert Georges and Alan Dundes (1963) seek to define the internal morphological characteristics of in terms of a topic-comment analysis; this analysis, in turn, is refined and extended by Charles Scott (1969). In a more recent article, Roger D. Abrahams and Alan Dundes (1972) address both structural and cognitive aspects of block elements in their discussion of the Gestalt which is created by the fit between the descriptive and referential segments of riddles. Their delineation of Gestalt-scrambling includes techniques ranging from inadequate description to ambiguity (in the case of false image). Ambiguity emerges as the focal point in a number of other treatments of the block element. Ian Hamnett (1967), for instance, claims that contain ambiguous words or elements that may belong to more than one frame of reference, and that such words or elements serve to mediate between otherwise disparate frames of reference in the riddle. As such, he claims that riddles and riddling may illuminate some of the principles that underly [sic] classi-