Studies On Meaning Generation Of Scalar Humor:A Cognitive Perspective

Being a common type of language behavior in human being's society, humor plays an essential role in achieving certain purposes in communication. Humor,which has various functions and types, is a complicated topic. The researchers who have touched the topic can be dated back to Plato, Aristotle and other famous philosophers. Indeed, a great number of studies on humor have been made from the perspectives of philosophy, sociology, anthropology, linguistics and literature as well as many other fields. Yet no standard model is possible to explain the deep generation of humorous meaning among all the researches.However, many factors have to be involved and interacted in order to explain the humorous meaning generation mechanism of humor from a whole-rounded aspect, which is often argued and discussed in linguistic field. Given the fact that few studies on certain specific humor are made among the various types as well as the lengthy limitation of post-graduation thesis, the paper is going to be limited to analyzing the dynamic meaning generation mechanism of scalar humor from a cognitive perspective. Incongruity-resolution, frame-shifting theory and metonymy theory from construal operations are adopted in this paper to analyze the interpretation and humorous meaning generation mechanism of scalar humor.The paper is attempting to explain what are listed below: 1) basically, the humorous meaning generation of scalar humor relies on the manipulation of conceptual scale via describing an entity in the first clause as having a high degree property to create an expectation in humor interpreter's mind and then the expectation is broken and the new imagery appears through incongruity-resolution mechanism; 2) frame-shifting serves as the cognitive resolution mechanism in understanding humor while construal operation is an specific incongruity packing device; 3) Furthermore, the conversion from conventional meaning to non-conventional meaning together with the background knowledge and contextual information plays a big part in the meaning construction of humor. Long-term memory interacts with the short-memory that is evoked by contextual information, which promotes humor interpreters'understanding of humorous meaning.This study is significant in the following two aspects: 1) Cognitive theories have great explicable power on humorous meaning generation of scalar humor; 2) The application of the cognitive theories to scalar humor can help people understand more thoroughly in the cognitive meaning generation mechanism of this special kind of humor from a more rounded aspect so as to establish a foundation to explain the humorous generation of scalar humor with its social and cultural motivation as well as its psychological motivation.