An Empirical Study On English Majors’ Understanding Of English Humor: A Cognitive-linguistic Approach

Humor is a kind of special but pervasive language phenomenon, ubiquitous in nearly all corners of people’s daily life. The researches on humor have lasted for centuries from ancient Greece to modern society, from Plato to Freud. Meanwhile, as humor is an interdisciplinary subject, the studies on humor vary from philosophy, anthropology, physiology, sociology and psychology. But in recent years, many scholars study humor from cognitive linguistics to explore the detailed process of understanding humor in people’s mind. There are some influential cognitive linguistic theories such as Semantic Script of Humor(SSTH), General Theory of Verbal Humor(GTVH), Incongruity-Resolution Theory(IR Theory) and Conceptual Blending Theory(CBT). Besides, a host of scholars attempt to interpret verbal humor through principles of semantics and pragmatics, such as Politeness Principles, Cooperative Principles(CP), Relevance Theory(RT) and so forth.However, previous researches of humor either at home or abroad in fact largely focus on interpretation of humor theories, or on the application of existing humor theories to perceive, analyze and understand humor phenomena. However, the researches on humor from cognitive perspective and pragmatics are done separately, but joint work of the two and empirical researches are both few.This study employs the Incongruity-Resolution Theory(IR Theory) and Relevance Theory(RT) as theoretical framework. According to IR theory, English humor occurs when participants perceive the incongruity by punch line, and thereby find the resolution of it through cognitive process in mind. For RT, the comprehension of humor jokes is a matter of choice between maximal relevance and optimal relevance through brain processing. Obviously, IR theory and RT have much in common and supplement each other in understanding English humor. Therefore, this study integrates IR Theory and RT to explore the situation of Chinese students’ understanding of English humor by using verbal jokes as data to answer two research questions:(1) To what extent can Chinese students of English majors understand the humor of English joke? And which kinds of jokes are more humorous to them?(2) Do EFL learners with a higher sense of humor have a better understanding of English humor than those with a lower sense of humor?The present study is an empirical one employing Funniness Judgment Task(FJT), together with the interviews, and Sense of Humor Questionnaire(SHQ) as research instruments and 75 English majors in Northwest Normal University as participants. Through data analysis, for one thing, the research results of FJT are that English humor jokes are rather humorous to Chinese English majors with the mean value of 3.18, but it is not satisfying on the whole. In comparison, IR jokes are more humorous(M=3.35) than I jokes(M=2.90). Specifically, the culturally-neutral jokes(M=3.37) are funnier than culturally-loaded ones(M=2.87) to all the participants. For another, from data analysis of SHQ, a majority of participants are of the trait of humor with the mean value of 3.54. Whereas the data of correlation shows that individual sense of humor has no obvious relation to English humor understanding, even the students with higher sense of humor exert no influence on understanding English jokes.In addition, the author in this study also analyzes the factors hindering full understanding of humor jokes mainly from individual sense of humor and personal knowledge of cultural information embedded in jokes. In accordance with responses to humor appreciation, the percentage of full understanding of culturally-neutral jokes reaches up to 60.60%, while the percentage of incomprehension of culturally-loaded jokes is 50.1%, which is a dramatic contrast. Therefore, obviously, the factor of cross-cultural knowledge dominates the reasons of incomprehension of humor. At last, the author further suggests in future students should pay more attention to the acquisition of cultural knowledge in learning foreign languages and still enhance second language proficiency and cognitive ability.