Elaboration Of Verbal Humor In Sitcom Growing Pains From The Perspective Of Conveptual Blending Theory

Since being introduced into the cognition field by Fauconnier & Turner, conceptual blending theory has received wide attention from foreign and domestic scholars and has been used to explain various cultural phenomena in many fields. While at the same time, humor is also a hot topic for experts to discuss, and verbal humor is a focus point for social scientists, especially for linguists. Using conceptual blending theory to explain the dynamic cognitive process of understanding verbal humor is not a new topic, because conceptual blending is completed through three kinds of operations, that is composition, completion and elaboration, and during the operation, two input spaces, one generic space and one blended space are connected together by selective projection to form a blending network. In the process, language processor will blend the existing background information stored in his brain and the newly input discourse information to form an emergent structure, while humorous effects are produced when the current thinking is contradictory to the conventional thinking. But whether this theory can be applied to elaborate verbal humor in situation comedy or not still needs our further research. Because verbal humor in sitcoms is different from small jokes or universal humor without background knowledge and the classification of verbal humor in sitcoms is also different from that of universal ones, the author attempts to prove whether the CBT can be used to explain verbal humor in sitcoms.The data of this paper is selected from a classical American sitcom Growing Pains which mainly describes stories happened in a family. At the first step,5 episodes (Episode 113, Episode 121, Episode 402, Episode 410 and Episode 525) are randomly selected from all the 118 episodes of the first 5 seasons of this sitcom, and then the competence-based approach is adopted to select 366 humorous sentences with background canned laughter. Based on Bergson's classification of verbal humor in sitcoms and considering the important role of background information which causes humorous effects in sitcoms, the argument of this paper is developed from three aspects:verbal humor at language level, verbal humor at situational level and verbal humor at cultural level. Through analyzing examples, we find that verbal humor at language level, like the use of puns or irony and so on, is popular in all kinds of verbal humor, while verbal humor at situational level and verbal humor at cultural level are characterized in sitcoms since most verbal humor in sitcoms are closely related with the image, personality and behavior of an individual character. Humorous effects may come out even for a boring sentence if it is uttered by a personalized character. The data of this paper is sourced from an American comedy, thus there are a lot of American or Western humors contained.All these three aspects of verbal humor in sitcoms have been further developed, and each one has been elaborated with the four basic types of blending networks: simplex network, mirror network, single-scope network and double-scope network. Through illustration and comparison, the author wants to provide certain reference for future research on verbal humor in sitcoms from this new angle. Certainly, this is only an attempt made by the author, so there must be many problems, such as due to the limitation of time and space, the corpus may be insufficient. Hope deficiencies and limitations in this research can be made up in the future.