A Schematic Approach To Humor Interpretation In English Children's Literature

Humor is laughable and amusing, which reflects people's wisdom and brings us great pleasure. This thesis is a tentative exploration into cognitive process of humor interpretation with an innovative application of the framework of Semantic Script Theory of Humor (Raskin,1985). It attempts to propose a new schematic framework in interpreting humor in English children's literature with detailed text analysis.In the literature review, it is found that the previous studies on humor have mainly focused on how the elements of incongruity is generated and detected from the viewpoint of phonetics, semantics or pragmatics. However, a mere discussion of the entertainment of incongruity is not adequate for revealing the implicit cognitive process of humor interpretation.Schema Theory provides a new perspective in the analysis of humor interpretation. From a schematic point of view, humor interpretation is a cognitive process of schemata establishment and contrast in terms of both the world schema and the text schema. The thesis depicts the humor interpretation process as follow:The world schema and the related elements are triggered as the model; The model is next adjusted to the specific lexicons at establishing text schema; the adjustment further leads to the establishment of a new schema that is likely to have partial overlapping or even opposition with the preceding schema. The schemata overlapping and opposition help to perceive the humor effect. Humor interpretation is a process in which the schemata are established and constructed to explore the schema overlapping and opposition.The research findings of this paper can be summed from the following three aspects. Firstly, the paper finds out the relationship of world schema and text schema. World schema would be triggered immediately when reading the text and serves as the model for the text schemata. Secondly, the paper discusses the schema-based lexicon and the combinatorial rule of the schema framework in humor interpretation. All the schemata are triggered based on the lexicon and combined into a whole with the combinatorial rule. In the combination process, the schema overlapping and opposition would serve to perceive the humor effect. Finally, the paper puts forward a general schema framework to illustrate the schematic approach in humor interpretation. The framework is constructed with the following four steps:evoking the general world schema, specifying the text schema, realizing being misled and switching the schemata and finally experiencing humor effect in connecting all the schemata.The research results of this study have the following implications:The schema framework proposed in this research formalizes the humor interpretation process with the detailed steps. In order to fully interpret humor, linguistic and cultural information form two major barriers. The inaccessibility of those two kinds of information would make the schema difficult to establish and unable to perceive the humor effect.