An Analysis Of Humor Utterance In Friends On The Basis Of Conceptual Integration Theory

Since Fauconnier had proposed Conceptual Integration Theory in the late1990s,which has aroused many scholars’ interest because of its strong interpreting powerand has become one of the most important theories in the cognitive linguistics in thewest. Faucounnier thought that the theory and its power of interpretation can be usedto explain all human cognitive activities. Many other foreign and Chinese scholarshave also verified its powerful interpretation from different angles.Humor plays an important role in every aspect of people’s lives, especially incommunication. The content and the form of humor are abundant and multiple, forexample verbal humor. Therefore, many scholars have studied the phenomenon ofverbal humor from different angles，such as pragmatics, semantics and rhetoric.Besides, some people used the Conceptual Integration Theory to explain thephenomenon of humor. However, how to use the Conceptual Integration Theory toexplain humor utterance in the sitcom needs further research and study. Therefore,this paper aims to explain that how to use the Conceptual Integration Theory toexplain the humor utterance in sitcom.In this thesis, the author mainly uses Conceptual Integration Theory, through itsfour network structures to explain humor utterance in sitcom. The corpus was selectedfrom a classic American sitcom Friends, according to the classification of humorutterance in sitcom which is proposed by Bergson, and the function of backgroundinformation on the effect of humor utterance in sitcom, this paper mainly from humor utterance at language level, humor utterance at situational level and humor utteranceat cultural level to demonstrate， and uses four basic networks of conceptualintegration respectively (simplex network, mirror network, single-scope network anddouble-scope network) to explain the humor utterance. The author hopes that thestudy from the relatively new perspective can benefit the interpretation of subtitle ofsitcom, and give people some help to understand humor utterance in American sitcomvery well. Of course, there exists some defects because of the limitation of time andcondition and the lack of the selected corpus, and the author hopes that this will beconsummated in the future.