On Humor Interpretation From A Cognitive-pragmatic Perspective: A Corpus-based Study

Humor is a ubiquitous phenomenon, and the history of humor research is long and rich. For centuries, scholars from various disciplines have been working on humor. Their researches have been fruitful and undoubtedly shed significant light on many aspects of humor ranging from its formation, essence, features, to the other topics concerned in humor. However, studies on humor from cognitive and pragmatic perspectives such as Relevance Theory and cognitive domains still remain great gaps for improving.This thesis aims to conduct a qualitative and quantitative corpus-based analysis of 8 episodes of Two and a Half Men, which was randomly selected from Season one of the sitcom. Based on the Idealized Cognitive Model (ICM), proximity/similarity principles of Stereotypical Relation together with traditional rhetorical devices, we establish a unified ICM framework in order to find out the underlying mechanism of the construal and generation of humorous effects through objective analysis with the help of related statistics.The paper consists of the following five chapters. Chapter One concentrates on a general introduction to this study, consisting of its rationale, objective, methodology and layout. Chapter Two presents the definitions and classifications of humor, and review previous approaches to humor. Chapter Three, based on the limitations of the previous researches, proposes a new ICM framework by adding proximity/similarity principles and rhetorical devices on the basis of ICM, and a case study will be performed within the new framework. Chapter Four concerns data analysis, specifically the application of the unified ICM framework to the corpus and attempts to uncover the construal and generation of humor's occurrences within the unified ICM framework. Chapter Five concludes with the main findings and shortcomings of the study.The main findings of the thesis are as follows: Firstly, by violating the original ICM, humorous effects are generated via the proximity/similarity principles of SR including rhetorical devices. Secondly, this thesis brings the complementarities between proximity/similarity principles and rhetorical devices into the unified ICM framework, thus adding up some new elements into language cognition. What's more, in virtue of the corpus statistics of the thesis, we probe into the underlying mechanism of humor construal and generation. In the meantime, the interface between cognitive linguistics and pragmatics is expanded to some extent and the power of explanation strengthened.