A Study On English Humor Reading From The Perspective Of Conceptual Blending Theory

Humor, as a pervasive language phenomenon, plays a significant role in our daily life. Inrecent years, many scholars do research on humor language from different perspectives, suchas sociology, psychology, philosophy, linguistics so on and so forth. Basically, humorinterpretation is a dynamic process of meaning construction. In this thesis, ConceptualBlending Theory proposed by Fauconnier and Turner is employed to analyze English humorreading.There are three questions proposed in this thesis. First, to what extent can ConceptualBlending Theory improve English humor reading? Second, as far as English learners areconcerned, whether Conceptual Blending Theory has strong explanatory power on Englishhumor? Third, what are the factors affecting the English learners’ perception of Englishhumor in reading? In order to solve these three problems, a survey including tests andquestionnaire and interview has been carried out on100freshmen of non-English majors.Quantitative and qualitative analysis has been done on the obtained data. And, quantitativeanalysis has been done by SPSS16.0.Through the analysis of the results in the survey, the author found that ConceptualBlending Theory helps the students in English humor reading and this theory has strong andpowerful explanation on English humor. However, some limitations of Conceptual BlendingTheory are found. Although the English learners have the ability of using ConceptualBlending Theory, they are not able to explain all the English humors. In other words,Conceptual Blending Theory can help the English learners understand the English humor onlyin some circumstances, not in all. Some factors may prevent them from understanding Englishhumor.Conceptual Blending Theory is a complicated and abstract theory. In this thesis, thesignificance in English humor understanding is proved through the results from the survey.English learners can improve the perception of English humor in reading by knowing thebasic idea of Conceptual Blending Theory. The author hopes that teachers can guide theEnglish learners to learn English humor by using Conceptual Blending Theory，so that theycan improve the perception of English humor in reading.