A Cognitive Approach To The Construal Mechanism Of Verbal Humor: An FRC Model

As a kind of verbal expression, humor is ubiquitous in daily life. Thisomnipresent language phenomenon has received extensive attention from the field ofphilosophy, literature, psychology and even linguistics. In linguistics, the researcheson humor are mainly conducted from semantic and pragmatic perspectives. Althoughsome scholars have attempted to adopt the cognitive approach, few of them haveapplied a model integrated from two or more theories to the analysis of humor.This thesis adopts qualitative methodology to analyze the verbal humor. Verbalhumor is something that is made entertaining, actually or potentially, through theverbal communication between speakers and listeners, excluding those made byridiculous facial expressions and behaviors.Frame Theory (FT) proposes that the essence of producing humor isframe-shifting, but it cannot explain why frame shifts. Relevance Theory (RT)applies the ostensive-inferential communication, contextual effects and processingefforts, and the gap between the maximal relevance and the optimal relevance tointerpret verbal humor, which supplements the shortcomings of FT, but RT is toogeneral and vague to reflect the dynamic construction of verbal humor. ConceptualBlending Theory (CBT) can be used to deduce the on-line dynamic construction ofverbal humor, which adequately supplements RT, but CBT lacks a guiding principlelike RT. Through the integration of the three theories, this thesis puts forward a newmodel---FRC model to reveal the construal mechanism of verbal humor, whichillustrates that if the relationship between Frame1and Input Space2turns out to be alack of relevance, while the relationship between Frame2, which is activated in InputSpace1by the means of frame shifting, and Input Space2meets the demand of theoptimal relevance, the meaning of the verbal humor can be construed in theEmergent Structure.The construal process of verbal humor based on FRC consists of the following five steps:(1) The audience first activates the salient frame (Frame1) inunderstanding the former part (Input Space1) of verbal humor based on the maximalrelevance;(2) Structure and elements in Frame1are partially imported into InputSpace2(i.e. Punch line) to establish a relationship, which turns out to be a lack ofrelevance;(3) The audience activates the other frame (Frame2) of the former part tocoincide with Input Space2based on the optimal relevance;(4) Structure andelements in Frame2are partially imported into Input Space2to establish connection,which is more appropriate than that between Frame1and Input Space2;(5) Theaudience compares two projections to construe the meaning of verbal humor in theEmergent Structure.The construal mechanism of verbal humor is displayed more clearly through theFRC model and therefore the explanatory power is enhanced.