The Analysis Of Verbal Humor In The Big Bang Theory By Categorization And The Prototype Theory

Humor exists everywhere and becomes an essential part of our lives. Humor hasdifferent classifications according to different criteria. In this paper, the demarcation putforward by Bergson is adopted and humor is classified into verbal humor and situationalhumor. Verbal humor is the main focus in this paper.Humor also is an interdisciplinary topic. Many research achievements have beenmade in psychology, philosophy and many other fields. It is true of linguistics. Manyscholars have analyzed verbal humor from the angles of semantics, rhetoric andpragmatics and so on. They have contributed a lot to our creation and understanding ofverbal humor. However, these studies have a common limitation that the cognitive factorsinvolved are ignored.As cognitive science develops, cognitive linguistics has become a new independentdiscipline and attracted much attention from linguists. In this thesis, verbal humor isinterpreted from new perspectives: the prototype theory and levels of categorization so asto further develop researches conducted by researchers before. Categorization refers tothe ability that people can not only find out similarities between objects in the colorfulworld from aspects of shape, function, attributes and so on, but also classify them intodifferent categories. Categorization is essential to our human. Like George Lakoff said:“Without categorization, we can do nothing in social and spiritual world”.In this thesis, examples of verbal humor selected from the Big Bang Theory arestudied from the viewpoints of the prototype theory and categorization to explore thecognitive mechanism behind verbal humor. By levels of categorization, according toprinciple of cognitive economy, basic level categories should be applied, however, subordinate categories are deliberately employed to create psychological gap between thespeaker and the hearer, which results in verbal humor; by prototype theory, prototypesshift as contexts change. The transfers from the prototype of a category in the speaker’scognitive context to one of its atypical members in the hearer’s cognitive context andfrom one of its peripheral members in the speaker’s cognitive context to its prototype inthe hearer’s cognitive context leads to psychological gap between the speaker and thehearer which can give rise to verbal humor.Achievements made by this study give us much enlightenment. They will help usunderstand verbal humor and further enjoy the sitcoms. Verbal humor in the Big BangTheory is natural and authentic language which reflects customs and culture of westerncountries. So they also can contribute a lot to English learning, English teaching and ourcross-cultural communicative competence.