Interpretation Of Chinese Brain Twisters From The Perspective Of Frame-Shifting

Chinese brain twister is a kind of language game with amusement quality, a kind of artificial creations, appearing with the form of question and answer. Humor is the prominent characteristic of brain twister, for brain twister can not exist without laughter. There is no doubt that brain twister brings a lot of enjoyment for us, but it is a pity that we seldom think about the reason why we burst out laughter, what makes brain twister 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 make the readers have a better understanding of brain twister.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 background. The theory of frame shifting, once applied to the research of on-line jokes, provides a good academic guidance to the study of Chinese brain twister.This thesis attempts to make a study of brain twister for the purpose of analyzing the frame-shifting strategies and exploring the internal cognitive mechanism of brain twisters. Based on frame differences propounded by Fillmore, Chinese brain twisters are classified into four types: encyclopedia knowledge frame→metalanguage frame; shifting of frames in the same event chain; idiom frame→literal meaning frame; metaphorical meaning frame→literal meaning frame.To study Chinese brain twister from the perspective of frame-shifting is a new try and to a certain degree, it can inspire the originators of Chinese brain twister to produce better works. And it can prove the strong explanatory power of this theory and may inspire researchers to conduct researches in humorous discourse from this angle.