Research On Verbal Humor In View Of Space-Synthesizing Theory

Scholars form home and abroad has done much research on humor in view of aesthetics, psychology, sociology and linguistics. But they did less research on the laughter-creating mechanism of verbal humor, and much less study on it from the perspectives of process, structure, and function. Fancconnier's space-synthesizing theory provides this thesis with a good theoretical support-point.This thesis discusses features of semantic structure and pragmatic functions of humorous utterance using space-synthesizing theory, and then it induces universal laws of laughter-creating. The author holds that semantic conflict of conceptual structure—semantic harmony is the result of solidification of humorous utterance and that dynamic semantic structure—function of humor theory is the grammatical abstract of laughter—creating mechanism of verbal humor in semantic and pragmatic levels.Although the humor—creating mechanisms of verbal humor from home and abroad are consistent, the formation mechanisms in syntactic level are different.Crosstalk and the variants of it—the short messages of mobile phone, are typical representative of Chinese verbal humor. The humor—creating mechanism of the burden of crosstalk is consistent with the dynamic semantic structure theory mentioned above. It inherits and develops the traditional means of mainly using language factors and rhetoric means and less integrated mental space.Crosstalk burden and short message of mobile phone express the style of Chinese verbal humor.Laughter is the common psychological reaction. The whole—part graphics theory of cognitive psychology explains the reason for laughing.