A Cognitive-Pragmatic Approach To Chinese Cold Jokes

Cold jokes, a newly emerged linguistic phenomenon in recent years, prevail and is extensively circulated on the Internet, entertainment programs, magazines, etc., particularly in the conversations among youth. Up to now, there is no way to cast back background origination of cold jokes, for it has been passed on with continuously updated contents through various ways such as the internet and everyday conversations. Cold jokes is a kind of humor beyond the conventional and logical thinking with an awkwardness and embarrassing silence by employing linguistic strategies such as ambiguity, homonym, personification, etc. to evoke incongruity with the addressee's defaulted expectation. Yet, the research on cold jokes is still in its infancy for most of the previous studies merely explored the types of humor used in cold jokes and its linguistic features at cultural and sociological level. Since there is still limitation in the studies from the perspective of cognition, the question what is the cognitive mechanism of cold jokes interpretation is just what the author attempts to answer in this thesis.This thesis proposes a new integrated framework on the basis of Conceptual Blending Theory, Pragmatic Presupposition and Incongruity-Resolution Theory by analyzing their strengths, weakness and complementarities. Based on the new model, the study concentrates on the cognitive mechanism of cold jokes interpretation and classifies Chinese cold jokes into six categories according to pragmatic presupposition triggers from the linguistic level and non-linguistic level, both of which can be further divided into smaller categories. Through detailed analysis, we hold that pragmatic presupposition in the generic space exist as an indispensable space builder in the process of incongruity-resolution, cross-mapping and blending. The conventional logic does not to work for the incongruity between the blended space and the addressee's default expectation which stimulates the addressee to plumb elements in two input spaces and pinpoint PP. Through the process of association, mapping, framing and other cognitive operations, the addressee shows a negative attitude toward cold jokes, and ultimately achieves the addresser's intention. This thesis consists of five parts. Chapter One provides a general introduction to the whole research, including the objectives, rationale and methodology as well as data collection of this thesis. In Chapter Two, the previous studies of humor and cold jokes in the West and China are reviewed in detail. In Chapter Three, an integrative model is set up after analyzing of the strengths and weaknesses of CBT, PP and IR to interpret cold jokes. Chapter Four describes the corpus of this thesis, and then illustrates PP as an indispensable space builder which plays a crucial role in incongruity and resolution, and classifies PP triggers into several groups. The conclusion is made in Chapter Five by presenting the thesis's contributions, limitations and suggestions for the future study.This thesis is a tentative analysis of the mechanism underlying Chinese cold jokes from the cognitive-pragmatic perspective. We hope that it can facilitate the research on cold jokes and shed some light on future studies pertinent to this language phenomenon.