The Study Of Verbal Humor In Chinese Cross Talk From The Perspective Of Frame-shifting

Chinese cross talk, as a form of traditional Chinese art, is a gem in Chinese art treasury. With its humorous style and incisive language, it is quite popular among the Chinese. Humor is the prominent characteristic of cross talk, for cross talk can not exist without laughter. There is no doubt that cross talk brings a lot of enjoyment for us, but it is a pity that seldom do we think about why we burst our sides with laughter , what makes cross talk so interesting and how to keep its charm. That is just the focus of the thesis. In this sense, this essay aims to find out the linguistic rules and human beings'cognitive mechanism behind the laughter by the application of frame-shifting, so as to have a better understanding of cross talk and effectively utilize the frame-shifting theory to produce more and better works of cross talk. Moreover it can also build a cultural bridge for foreigners interested in Chinese cross talk.The general idea of"frame"dates back to the work by Bateson, and has been applied to the study of artificial intelligence and sociology, while in the field of linguistics, Fillmore defines"frame"as a system of categories whose structure is rooted in some motivating context. Frame-shifting is a sort of conceptual revision and it reflects the operation of semantic reanalysis process that reorganizes existing information into a new frame; in frame-shifting, the crucial factor is default values which are mainly drawn from our long-term memory concerning certain typical backgrounds. The theory of frame shifting, which was once applied to the research of on-line jokes, provides a good academic guidance to the study of Chinese cross talk, for it puts a lot of emphasis on the dynamic aspect of language understanding which is the key to the production of humorous effect in cross talk.Humor can be divided into two groups: situational humor and verbal humor. (Bergson, 1911). Situational humor will be omitted in this paper while verbal humor is our primary concern. Frame-shifting is crucial to the humorous effect in Chinese cross talk and in this paper the triggers for frame-shifting are studied from two aspects. All the data in the study are quoted from the works of classical Chinese cross talk which are representative of this special form of folk art and win universal praise among the Chinese. The study of lexical triggers starts from the micro point of view while the latter one from the macro point of view. In the first part of Chapter four, the lexical triggers are explored in details on the basis of the three characteristics of lexicon including ambiguity, vagueness and generality, and the pertinent examples are studied on the basis of frame-shifting theory."Discourse"is a more embracing term that calls attention to the situated use of language. Compared with the lexical study, it puts more emphasis on the macro aspect of language—context; in the second part of Chapter four, discoursal triggers include the following three types linguistic context, situational context and cultural context and the typical examples in each group are analyzed.The study helps us to explore the hearers'cognitive mechanism in the understanding of Chinese cross talk by the application of frame-shifting, and find out the triggers of frame-shifting. To study Chinese cross talk from the perspective of frame-shifting is a new try and to a certain degree, it can inspire the originators of Chinese cross talk to study it from a new point of view so as to produce more and better classic works. Besides, it builds a cultural bridge for the foreigners interested in Chinese cross talk.