The Language of Riddles: New Perspectives

For the folklorists and linguists who are serious students of what has been designated "a minor genre," the riddle is, in fact, a complex linguistic and aesthetic structure that, when subjected to systematic and scientific study, reveals a great deal about the major human systems-such as language, culture, and art-with which it is inextricably bound up.
Riddles conform to a model of communication made up of a code and an encoded message that is first transmitted and then decoded. As what Pro…