A Cognitive Approach To "Trap-setting" Cell Phone Messages

The cell phone message discourse as a new focus of linguistic researches arouses academic attentions in realms of rhetoric, psychology, cognitive pragmatics, etc. Enlightened by these academic attempts, this thesis conducts another new experiment through theoretical thinking and data analyses, namely, a cognitive approach to"trap-setting"messages. This kind of messages has the characteristics of both the humorous and the electronic discourse so that it deserves analyses and provides possibility to the combined research of both message discourse and textual humor. This tentative study is another application of cognitive theories. Meanwhile, it excavates a new language phenomenon, providing a new academic angle for dynamic linguistic researches.Different from the previous studies, this thesis will probe into message readers'mental mechanisms involved in the process of the humor interpretation from the cognitive perspective. The cognitive theories applied here involve the theory of Current Discourse Space and Prototype Theory. Innovatively, they are combined into a new cognitive model, namely, the CDS-PT model. In the model, the CDS is a general principle for discourse comprehension, revealing the mental mechanisms of lineal information deduction; while the PT unveils a process of semantic salience in mental space. They can mutually complete each other and their joint effect facilitates the realization of textual humor.Through exemplification, this study finally concludes as follows. Each sentence or clause of a"trap-setting"message corresponds to a mental frame. When information inputs through frames in file, it will be processed to build an event category in which an expectation that overlaps with the prototype is produced at the same time. The textual effect is just decided by the contrast between the actual salient example and the prototype. When the actual salient example made by the final inputs is very far from the expectation, the mental gap will certainly come into being and trigger the humor, which is called bad-example salience. Otherwise, the actual example is called good-example, whose salience explains the common textual effect.This cognitive analysis on"trap-setting"messages meaningfully let communicators know the way they understand humor, which can be utilized for humor message writing so as to strengthen its communicative function and meet people's communicative demand. On the other hand, the exposition of mental mechanisms may contribute to the regularization of the forms and contents of messages, making them more acceptable and interesting.