On The Analysis Of English Humor Based On Conceptual Blending Theory

As a pervasive human phenomenon, humor plays an important role in daily life. Nowadays, the researches about humor are from various angles such as sociology, philosophy, psychology, linguistics, etc. From the perspective of cognitive linguistics, many theories are applied to explain the cognitive process in understanding humor in people's mind, such as Frame-shifting theory, Semantic Script Theory of Humor (SSTH), General Theory of Verbal Humor (GTVH) and so on. Conceptual Blending Theory (CBT) which is put forward by Gilles Fauconnnier in 1994 aims to explore the specific cognitive process based on the mental space blending and on-line meaning construction. This theory supplies a new angle to research on English humor. A survey of the English humor understanding by freshmen is made in this thesis.Two questions are proposed in this thesis:1. Can the Conceptual Blending Theory improve students' ability of understanding English humor?2. Does Conceptual Blending Theory have explanatory power on English humor in students' mind?In order to answer the two questions, a survey is carried out on 84 freshmen (non English majors, CET score above 400) who are from different schools and different majors. Firstly the students are asked to do the humor test in 30 minutes (make sure that no one knows CBT). Secondly, some basic concepts and their relationships of CBT are introduced to the students 30 minutes later until almost all of the students know CBT. Then the students are asked to do the same test in 30 minutes by using CBT strictly which they just learnt. Finally, the students are required to finish the questionnaires based on their own opinion in ten minutes. In this way the significance of using CBT can be checked.Through the analysis of the results, the author finds that CBT does help the students understand English humor deeply and the theory also has powerful explanation on English humor. During the analysis process, some weak points in CBT are also found, for the students can not use this theory to explain English humor when there are some factors that prevent them from understanding English humor even if they have the ability of using CBT.CBT is a complicated theory. The author makes a survey to prove its significance: knowing the basic idea of CBT can make the students improve their ability in understanding English humor. The author wishes that the teachers may guide the students to use CBT in learning language phenomena so that the students may improve their ability in understanding and analyzing other language phenomenon as well as the English humor.