Cultural Schema And Humor Interpretation

As a means of interpersonal communication and a common form of art, humor has penetrates every aspect of social life and plays an important role, especially in human interactions, just as Berger states:"it insinuates itself into every aspect of our lives and sticks its big nose in where we don't want it."(Berger, 1992) So humor has always been the focus of researchers'attention.The early study of humor can date back to the time of the great philosophers, such as Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, etc. However, according to Salvatore Attardo (1994), it is not until the late 1970s that humor researches are performed from linguistic perspective. Over the last 20 years, with the development of semantics, pragmatics, cognitive science, the theories of humor have become increasingly rich and specific covering almost all the branches of linguistic field. Humor, as a special language phenomenon, is a special carrier of culture. So humor research from the cross-cultural perspective has attracted more and more attention and interest. However, there have been comparatively few, even rare researches contributing to humor research from both the cognitive and cultural perspective. Therefore, from the cognitive and cultural perspective, the present study intends to apply cultural schema theory to humor interpretation so as to investigate how cultural background knowledge influences the understanding of humor and what role cultural schema plays in humor interpretation, and then explore the importance of cultural schema building in cross-cultural communication.Schema can be derived into formal schema and content schema, while cultural schema, which concerns the knowledge of culture in general, belongs to content schema. Cultural schema is a conceptual structure that enables an individual to store perceptual and conceptual information about his/her culture and make interpretations of cultural experiences and expressions. Once needed, the cultural schema pre-stored in one's brain will be activated by the language users to get rid of the obstruction and solve the problems resulting from cultural differences. This theory has been applied to vocabulary acquisition, listening process, culture studies and translation field. An investigation is carried out in the form of questionnaire and interview. Ten representative cultural humors, which can be roughly classified into five categories: religion, history, geography, national psychology and others, are selected. 85 first-year college students majoring in English in College of Foreign Language Teaching of Shandong Normal University participated in the investigation. The subjects were required to read the ten cultural humors and then answer some questions. Following that, an interview is held with the randomly chosen students. The topic focuses on whether they can truly understand the selected humors; what are the humorous points and which humors they do not feel funny at all. For the convenience of the study, the author divides the associated culture knowledge into five categories in accordance to the classification of humors in the questionnaire, and analyses the role cultural factors play in humor interpretation with a certain amount of cultural humor illustrations. Through the analysis of the data of the questionnaire and the interview, we find that to Chinese readers, getting the key point in the true understanding of cultural humor depends on whether they have the related pre-stored cultural background knowledge. So besides linguistic factors, the lack of cultural schema constitutes the biggest barrier to cultural humor interpretation. So is the cross-cultural communication. Therefore, besides the linguistic factor, construction of cultural schema is essential to improving language learning, humor interpretation as well as cross-cultural communication competence.It has been proved that the research of humor interpretation from cognitive and cultural perspective has its theoretical as well as practical significance. Theoretically, it provides a new angle for humor research and enriches humor study. Practically, it can provide a new teaching approach. In the process of English teaching, teachers can introduce humor as a learning addendum, thus not only some fresh and pleasant air is brought into the English class, but also students'cultural schemata will be build, accordingly their cross-cultural communicative competence will be greatly improved.