Questioning the purpose and success of occasionalisms as a source of humour in How I Met your Mother

Abstract

This paper focuses on the links between lexical creativity and humour in How I Met Your Mother, an American sitcom. More specifically, I analyse occasionalisms in order to determine how the word-formation processes used to create occasionalisms and the intended functions of those occasionalisms help create humorous potential for the viewers. Indeed, in the corpus, occasionalisms have both creative forms and creative purposes, and these forms and purposes vary but all seem to participate in the overarching function of humour. The paper also focuses on some occasionalisms that have unconventional functions, mostly those that are represented as being partly unsuccessful or deceitful. I also show that various factors have to be taken into account to analyse the humorous potential of occasionalisms.

Keywords

• How I Met Your Mother
• humour
• lexical creativity
• nonce formation
• occasionalisms
• sitcom