Frame-shifting Theory On English Verbal Humor

As a special art of language, humor has been an indispensable element in our dailylife. It reflects human’s cognitive intelligence to objective things and the society. Theappreciation of humor mainly depends on the comprehension of the unconventionallanguage. Since humor plays an important role in our daily life, a lot of psychologists,sociologists, and linguists attempt to explore its operating mechanism. This thesis is basedon Frame-shifting Theory and chooses the humorous utterances in Friends as the researchobject to study the cognitive mechanism of comprehending humor. It aims to help humorreceivers better comprehend humor and humor makers more successfully create humor inactual context.This thesis consists of six chapters in all.Chapter one introduces the motivation, purpose, significance and the structure of thisthesis.Chapter two describes the studies of humor and sitcom. It mainly introduces linguisticand nonlinguistic studies of humor. As for the linguistic studies of humor, we enumerateSemantic Script Theory of Humor (SSTH), the General Theory of Verbal Humor (GTVH),the Relevance Theory, and the Conceptual Integration Theory. With regard to nonlinguisticstudies of humor, we list three traditional theories of humor; they are Superiority Theory,Relief Theory, and Incongruity Theory. We also introduce some studies of sitcom and pointout that the analyses of the humor in sitcoms from the perspective of Frame-ShiftingTheory is a new try and is the innovation of this research.Chapter three is the theoretical framework of this thesis. We first introduce thedefinition and development of Frame and then depict the content of Frame-Shifting Theoryand its five cognitive perspectives, i.e. typical situations, default values, reinterpretation,goal presupposition, and nonconventional meanings to serve for the analyses of humor inChapter four as a theoretical foundation.Chapter four is the main body of this thesis. We first find out the frequency of usage of the five cognitive perspectives in the third season of Friends and notice that typicalsituation and goal presupposition are most frequently used and default value is least used.This may relate to the degree of difficulty associated with its use, and people tend tochoose the one which is easier to use. Then, we select several humorous dialogues from thethird season of Friends, and analyze them from the five cognitive perspectives ofFrame-Shifting Theory to interpret the audience’s cognitive processes. By the analyses, wesummarize the processes of interpreting humor from the perspective of Frame-ShiftingTheory, find out the deficiency of this theory and add the cognitive perspective of Topics.Chapter five carries out an empirical study to test the importance of backgroundknowledge in the comprehension of humor and attempts to make a rank of the fivecognitive perspectives concerning their ability to achieve the effect of humor. The resultspresent that background knowledge does play a significant role in the comprehension ofhumor, and it fails to rank the five cognitive perspectives with reference to their ability ofachieving the effect of humor.Chapter six lists the major findings, implications, and the future work of the study ofhumor.