TECM Of Verbal Humor Under The Framework Of Cognitive Rhetoric

Most verbal humor is expressed by several rhetorical devices; therefore, verbal humor is a kind of rhetorical phenomenon. Till now, a lot of scholars study verbal humor from different angles, such as semantics, pragmatics, rhetoric, cognitive linguistics, etc. However, neither researches from Cognitive Rhetoric perspective, nor researches into serial witty skits of Zhao Benshan are seen. This thesis, from the perspective of Cognitive Rhetoric, attempts to propose TECM (Transferred ECM) which is based on ECM theory, and to analyze the cognitive rhetoric mechanism of verbal humor in the four witty skits via this model at full length.This thesis consists of five chapters.Chapter One serves as a general introduction to the thesis, which includes motivation of the study, objectives of the study, methodology and data collection, and layout of the thesis.Chapter Two makes a review of verbal humor from the rhetoric, semantic, pragmatic and cognitive perspectives, and then points out the gap of these studies.Chapter Three establishes the theoretical framework. In this chapter, to bridge the gap of the previous studies of verbal humor, TECM, which includes Level E (Event), Level A/B (Action/Being), and Level D/C, will be proposed from the Cognitive Rhetoric angle to explain the cognitive rhetoric mechanism of verbal humor. Chapter Four establishes the corpus of Zhao Benshan's serial witty skits of"Baiyun-Heitu", and makes a statistical analysis of the humorous points via TECM.Chapter Five brings the thesis to a conclusion by summarizing the major findings:(1) It is the first attempt to study verbal humor from the Cognitive Rhetoric angle, and propose TECM, which is based on ECM to analyze cognitive rhetoric mechanism of verbal humor.(2) It is the first attempt to establish the corpus of Zhao Benshan's serial witty skits of"Baiyun-Heitu". Through statistical analysis, the thesis finds that the transference in TECM most happens on level E (37.1%), level A (22.0%) and B (20.8%) take the second place, level D (6.3%) and C (13.8%) are the least.(3) This thesis finds 14 kinds of common rhetorical devices which can trigger verbal humor. In addition, this chapter also points out the limitation of the present study and puts forward suggestions for further study.