Humor-generating Mechanism Underlying 173 Trap-setting Short Messages

With the popularity of mobile phones or cells, the communication by short messages has exerted a great impact on people's work and life. The distinctive features of cells'short messages have drawn much attention from the researchers in linguistic field. One type of short messages, called trap-setting short messages, which are meant"tricky"to fool people for humor, has its specific features. Some scholar studies the textual characteristics of trap-setting short messages from the perspective of functional linguistics. Some scholars discuss the generative process of trap-setting text messages from the perspective of cognitive linguistics without corpus and statistics. This thesis is aimed at singling out this type of messages for study with a view to finding out its humor-generating mechanism by analyzing 173 trap-setting short messages collected from the Internet and books as our closed corpus. An RBT model is built on the basis of the advantages, disadvantages and complementarities of Relevance Theory and Conceptual Blending Theory as the theoretic framework of the thesis.Trap-setting short messages are divided into five subtypes, that is, animal-based, event-based, object-based, character-based, and homophony-based in this thesis. In the RBT model, elements in RT are blended into the conceptual integration network. Relevance and inference play an important role in the procedure of conceptual blending, especially in cross-space mapping and blending, which complements the deficiencies in CBT that is not adequate in interpreting the working mechanism among spaces. The process of humor-generating is also a generative process of new concepts. Concepts like mental space, emergent structure put forward in CBT are powerful in concept generation, which makes up the weaknesses of meaning construction in RT. This thesis adopts this model to explore the humor-generating mechanism in trap-setting short messages and the characteristics of trap-setting as well. Contributions of the thesis can be concluded as follows.1. A cognitive RBT model is put forward based on the advantages, disadvantages and complementarities of RT and CBT and is applied to analyze the humor-generating mechanism of trap-setting short messages.2. The 173 trap-setting short messages are collected from the internet and books. A detailed statistics is carried out and authentic data are obtained.3. It adds homophony-based trap-setting to the previous classification.4. According to the data, it analyzes the criteria for choosing the target of trap-setting.Theoretically speaking, RBT is feasible in interpreting the humor-generating mechanism in trap-setting short messages. Meanwhile we hope this research can give some inspirations to the short message creators so that they can create more wonderful short messages. In this sense, this study is significant in practice.