How Pun Creates Humor

Pun, as a figure of speech, is popularly employed in both oral and written language. It has attracted many scholars'attention and has been studied from various angles. However, most of the studies are limited to its definition,classifications,features,and rhetoric effects, or the comparison and translation between puns in Chinese and English. Lately, there are more and more researches of pun from linguistic perspectives like semantic perspective, pragmatic perspective, and cognitive perspective. A few of them concern the underlying cognitive mechanism of pun in terms of Conceptual Blending Theory, but most of which are still rough. There are also some cognitive studies of pun by means of other cognitive theories, which offer us much nourishment and give us some hints. Nevertheless, few of them pay attention to the creation of humor in pun.Cognitive linguistics posits that language is a reflection of human cognitive ability. With this as a guideline, this study aims to reveal pun's meaning construction process and thereby to find how humor is produced in pun, so that the cognitive mechanism behind pun can be explored.The theoretical framework we employ is Conceptual Blending Theory. As an on-line meaning construction theory and a powerful explanatory theory, its application is not only found in language phenomena, like syntax, idioms, and poetic image, but also in other disciplines like social science and scientific field.The conclusion achieved in this paper is that Conceptual Blending Theory is applicable to pun's explanation, and pun is a reflection of human's conceptual blending ability. By utilizing the similarities of sound or form of expressions, it merges the two meanings into a hinge which helps to establish the generic space that governs mappings between the inputs. The elements from the inputs are selectively projected into the blend. In the blend, through composition, elaboration and completion, the new emergent structure arises. But in the blend, there always exist conflicts. Humor effects are found in the process of resolving the conflicts.Through this research, we hope that we can leave some hints for the later studies of pun and hope them can be more profound and deeper. Also, we expect that Conceptual Blending Theory can be applied to more language phenomena and other fields. Since our study is a cognitive one, we hope that it can advance the development of cognitive linguistics and further promote the development of cognitive science.