Cognitive Analysis Of Interpretive Mechanism Of Verbal Humor From A Three-Dimensional Perspective

Verbal humor, as a language phenomenon, has long attracted wide attention of scholars from such disciplines as philosophy, psychology, sociology, linguistics, cognitive science, etc. It is best represented in a traditional form of humor and entertainment in China, cross-talks, which have their own laughter trigger, wrappers. This paper intends to look into the interpretive mechanism of verbal humor in cross-talk wrappers as well as to uncover the cognitive process the audience go through in understanding them, based on the analyses of the collected data through a questionnaire and an interview about how people understand classical wrappers in time-enduring cross-talks.This research is well founded on the three-dimensional perspective from cognition-related theories:Semantic Script Theory of Humor (SSTH), Relevance Theory (RT) and Conceptual Blending Theory (CBT) on the assumption that they are complementary in interpretation of the interpretive mechanism of verbal humor revealed in cross-talk wrappers. SSTH serves as a starting point for explaining the working of the verbal humor. Unfortunately, it can not account for why the audience first activate the default script. RT helps to solve the problem by filling the gap between the maximal relevance and the optimal relevance. However, RT, as the general guiding principle of verbal communication, fails to expose the specific process of how the verbal humor works on and reach out to the audience, which is right complemented by CBT through conceptual networks.The originality of this thesis lies in its three-dimensional cognitive perspective to explore the interpretive mechanism of verbal humor in cross-talks and the construction of a cognitive model to shape audience's cognitive process in understanding cross-talk wrappers.Undoubtedly, this paper will contribute to the further research of verbal humor, as well as to enrich the means of empirical study in this field. However, due to the subjectivity and inadequacy of this tentative study, its findings and the constructed cognitive model are open to criticism and further examination. The author sincerely hopes more and more researchers will share her interest in this field for further study.