Studies On Verbal Humor In Sitcom From The Perspective Of Conceptual Blending Theory

Dating back to the Aristotlely times, scholars have never ceased the research on verbalhumor. The mysteries of its form, application, understanding mechanism and generatingmechanism have attracted notable scholars from fields such as psychology, sociology,literature, philosophy as well as linguistics. As far as linguistics is concerned, the previousstudies of verbal humor have mainly focused on the fields like rhetoric, semantics andpragmatics. With the rapid development of cognitive linguistics, theories from this fieldhave been applied to the verbal humor research, and Conceptual Blending Theory(hereafter referred to as CBT) ranks among them. However, studies from this particularaspect are more or less limited on the theoretical level, and few of them have tried to do theresearch from the empirical angle. The data are, more often than not, extracted from somerandom collections of jokes and thus the according studies fail to show the explanatorypower of CBT in explaining verbal humor in a more practical and real context. Based onthe previous studies, the present thesis attempts to illustrate the understanding andgenerating process of verbal humor by analyzing the verbal humor extracted from sitcomFriends from the perspective of CBT and aims to throw more light on the explanatorypower of CBT.This thesis begins with the definition and classification of humor, and introducessitcom, Friends and the theoretical basis of the present paper, that is, CBT. On the basis ofthe classification of context, the author then categorizes verbal humor into three differentcategories: language verbal humor, cultural verbal humor and situational verbal humor.Based on the four basic types of conceptual blending network, the author divides eachcategory into four sub-categories. And in sum, there are12sub-categories. However,verbal humor created by the repetition of a particular word would not be discussed heresince the generation of this kind of verbal humor doesn’t involve the blending of twomental spaces. Finally, some specific examples of every single category and sub-category are singled out and the on-line dynamic process of the generation of verbal humor isillustrated. Based on CBT and data analysis, conclusions have been reached as follows:1)Most of the verbal humor in situation comedies can be interpreted without a particularcontext.2) Humor is not for humor’s sake.3) Sentences using a certain kind of figure ofspeech tend to be explained by a particular type of conceptual blending network.4) Thesystematic study concerning verbal humor in Friends can be conducted from the cognitiveperspective. CBT helps to illustrate the generating and understanding process of specifichumorous examples in Friends, which accordingly shows its great explanatory power inthe generation and comprehension of verbal humor in sitcom at the empirical level.