Cognitive Exploration Of Cross-cultural Transmission Of Verbal Humor

As a form of art and a means of interpersonal communication, humor plays animportant role in social life. With the development of intercultural communication,the cross-cultural transmission of humor has become an unavoidable trend. Humorusually bears rich cultural connotations; therefore, it is not only a linguistic concept,but also a cultural phenomenon.Many studies about humor have been carried out by scholars of the world invarious fields. However, little attention has been given to the cross-culturalinterpretation and transmission of humor. Therefore, this paper aims to explore theinterpretation of exotic humor by virtue of cultural schema and optimal innovationhypothesis from the cognitive and cultural perspective.Cultural schema is a conceptual structure that enables people to store culturalbackground information. Once needed, it will be activated to help make interpretationof cultural experiences and expressions. Different cultural communities form differentcultural schemata of their own. Human beings possess some common cognitive andpsychological mechanisms. These same experiences and understanding to the sameobjects or things form the equivalence in different cultural schemata. At the same time,each nation has its own distinguishing or unique features in many areas, which isrepresented by the different understanding of some same objects, or by the lack ofcertain concepts in different cultural communities. By comparing English and Chinesecultural schemata, this thesis identifies four different kinds of schemata which havegreat influence upon the interpretation of exotic humor. They are equivalent schemata,partial equivalent schemata, contradictory schemata and vacant schemata.Successful humor interpretation needs the shared cultural schemata between thehumor creator and receiver, which enable the receiver to recognize and fill up themissing informative gap by activating the corresponding schemata and consultingthem. In another word, similar cultural schemata and their successful activation atproper time guarantee effective interpretation of humor. In the light of optimalinnovation hypothesis, pleasure can only be obtained by recipients on two conditions： (1) recognize the novelty (2) complete the automatic recoverability of familiarityrelated to that humor. Only in this way, the optimal innovation would be achieved.Cultural schema theory and optimal innovation hypothesis jointly giveexplanation to the interpretation of humor. Once humor contains cultural connotationswhich are exclusive to a certain cultural group, its pleasure will only be felt byinsiders but outsiders will fail to understand it. The contradictory and vacancybetween cultural schemata in English and Chinese humor lead to the failure inunderstanding each other’s humor. Therefore, culture-specific humor is a mainobstacle for the interpretation of exotic humor. Humor receivers should raise theircross-cultural awareness, accumulate cultural schemata of the target community andshow leniency in understanding exotic humor in order to foster the interpretation andtransmission of exotic humor.There are six chapters in this thesis.Chapter One describes the motivation, significance and framework of thisresearch.Chapter Two introduces the previous achievements on humor study and pointsout the existing insufficiencies.Chapter Three elaborates the theoretical foundations, namely, the cultural schematheory and optimal innovation hypothesis. Then, methodology applied in this paper isalso introduced.Chapter Four and Chapter Five are the key parts of the thesis. The paper makes acomparative analysis between the cultural schemata in English and Chinese humor.Then, the process of humor interpretation and appreciation is probed by virtue ofcultural schema and optimal innovation hypothesis.Chapter Six is the last part to conclude major findings, implications andlimitations of this research.