Generation Process And Influential Variables Of Language Humor

A comprehensive study of language humor should be based on the accurate defining of the study object——humor. The existence of language humor is proposed in the present study to be judged by the realization of humor effect in language perceiver's perspective.In Cognitive linguistics perspective, Conceptual Blending Theory (CBT) can provide the persuasive analysis of humor generation process. The utterance interpretation in the cognitive world of a perceiver should include the mutual interaction of four mental spaces——input mental space 1(IMS1) which stores the old information; input mental space 2(IMS2) which stores the new information; generic space which stores social and cultural rules and the blending spaces which stores the implied meaning of the language. According to the CBT, in the humor generation process, the IMS1 and IMS2 mutually conflict under the guidance of the information in generic space. The information conflict generates the incongruity in the language perceiver's mind. The humor effect is the consequence of the incongruity between the two instants of psychological cognition of the perceiver towards the speaker's linguistic expression according to the language context.However, the CBT can only describe the humor generation process but fail to provide convincing explanation to how the elements of the linguistic expression ensure the existence of humor.This present thesis takes a further step to check the influential variables to see how their values interact with each other and create the humor effect. The essential variables which influence the humor generation are the language of the speaker, the knowledge of the hearer, and the influence of the language to the hearer. The values of these variables which function together will influence the humor effect. The present thesis tries to use the binary division method to study these influential variables.