Study Of Chinese Students' Understanding For English Humor Based On Incongruity-Resolution Theory

The study of humor lasts for a long time. Sociology, psychoanalysis and cognitive science are the three major approaches for domestic and foreign scholars. In the recent five decades, cognitive linguistic approaches have become the focus of the study and already yielded various fundamental and influential theories. The most important ones are: Conceptual Integration Theory (CI), Incongruity-Resolution Theory (IR theory) and its development--Setup-Incongruity-Resolution Model (SIR model). With these scientific theories, it is easy to clarify how verbal jokes are structured, generated and perceived. However, most previous studies of humor focus only on humor itself, humor theories or the use of humor theories in comprehending and understanding humor, such as, analyzing verbal humor from the perspectives of pragmatics or semantics etc..On the basis of Incongruity-Resolution Theory (IR theory), the author, in this thesis, intends to find out the understanding of Chinese students'for English humor. The present thesis mainly researches verbal humor from the perspective of audiences to look into their understanding of English humor, which has rarely been done before.Case study is employed in the present study, and verbal jokes are used as data in the questionnaire. The author delivered the questionnaires among 397 students from Chang'an University and Xi'an International University and collected 317 valid ones. Through the analysis, the author finds that the Chinese students basically can not understand English jokes except IR jokes, and comes to know the reasons of the incomprehension for English jokes from linguistic and cultural aspects. Finally, resolutions are put forward according to different reasons. The author suggests that Chinese students should pay more attention to culture study in learning a foreign language and develop bilingual and bicultural communication competence.