A Study Of Verbal Humor In Friends From The Perspective Of Conceptual Integration Theory

Humor permeates our life, especially our daily communication. It not only bringsus laughter, but also relieves our pressure and makes us relaxed. Humor has beenstudied all the time from the ancient times to the present. The earliest study of humorcan be dated back to the time of Plato and Aristotle. The studies of verbal humorinvolve many different disciplines, such as philosophy, psychology, aesthetics andlinguistics and so on. However, the study of humor from the cognitive perspective isrelatively new and still in the phase of development.In the late20thcentury, Fauconnier and Turner put forward the ConceptualIntegration Theory which has been applied to the study of many linguistic phenomena,such as euphemism, pun and ambiguity etc. and proves highly explanatory. In thisthesis, the author applies the Conceptual Integration Theory to explaining theproduction and appreciation of verbal humor. To be specific, the author mainly usesthe four conceptual integration networks, namely: the simplex network, the mirrornetwork, the single-scope network and the double-scope network to analyze the verbalhumor dynamically to prove that the Conceptual Integration Theory also has a strongexplanatory power in analyzing verbal humor.Based on CIT, seventy-four specific instances of verbal humor are chosen fromSeason3of Friends for analysis. According to the principles of the four conceptualintegration networks, the author classifies the seventy-four verbal humor into fourkinds and selects two specific examples from each of the four kinds to analyze ingreat detail. The dynamic analysis of the above eight pieces of verbal humor showsclearly how humor arises in the process of communication, which hopefully will helppeople better understand and appreciate the production of humor in the future.