Humor as a Structure-Creating Mechanism: A Case of Recent Diachrony in Contemporary Spanish

Despite the extensive body of research on the social aspects of humor, relatively few studies consider humor as an active element in the formation of linguistic structure (in the structuralist sense). In this regard, the present paper explores the role of humor in the diachronic evolution of qué…ni que-insubordinate structures in Contemporary Spanish and outlines a possible integration of humor into an interactive construction grammar (Croft, 2001).