A Cognitive Analysis Of Puns In American Sitcom The Big Bang Theory From The Perspective Of Conceptual Blending Theory

As one of the widely used rhetoric methods in English, puns, with itsover-two-thousand-year long history, are widely applied in different genres, such asliterature works, advertisements, daily conversation, humorous stories, riddles, etc.Puns play an important role in producing and carrying humorous effects. Throughoutthe development of puns, it is noticed that former studies on puns are mainly focusedon its definitions, classifications, pragmatic functions, translation strategies and areusually confined to the scope of rhetoric, semantics and pragmatics. In recent30years,with the rapid development of cognitive science, more and more researches have beencarried out from the perspective of cognitive linguistics. However, among thesecognitive studies of puns, a minority of them has paid attention to the dynamicmeaning construction process of pun in terms of Conceptual Blending Theory, andeven fewer have focused on how humorous effects are produced in puns. With thehelp of Archibald’s “Three Essential Factors of Puns”, this thesis conducts manycognitive analysis of the puns in The Big Bang Theory from the perspective ofConceptual Blending Theory to reveal the dynamic generation mechanisms of punsand their humorous effects from the angle of the pun-maker.After a detailed qualitative analysis of several cases, this research draws someconclusions as follows.(1) The dynamic generation mechanism of puns: Serving asthe trigger for the generation of the puns, pun-maker’s real purpose stimulates theformation of the generic space and guides the pun-maker to find out a properexpression (that is the “hinge” for the pun’s generation) to connect pun’s doublecontexts. Then the double meanings of the hinge create the double contexts for thepun which provide two different frames, or we say two different image schemas to theinput spaces. While, the generic space plus some related information of the pun’sdouble contexts and presumptions about the whole world determine what elementsshould be selected into the two input spaces and guide the cross-space mappingbetween the two input spaces. As the elements of the two input spaces matching witheach other through cross-space mapping, pun’s double contexts begin to convert toeach other around the hinge. Along with the transformation between pun’s doublecontexts, elements and frames of the two input spaces are selectively projected intothe blended space (that is the process of frame-shifting). This makes hinge’s semanticcore shift to the implied meaning of the pun. After composition, completion and elaboration, a newborn structure named emergent structure are generated in theblended space and so is the puns’ emergent meaning. This is the generation of a pun.(2) The humor production mechanism of puns: when emergent structure is generatedin blended space, there would appear many conflicts between the elements of blendedspace. When people take the related background information and the concrete contextof the pun into consideration, the conflicts within the blended space would be solved,and pun’s humorous effects would be produced at the same time.All in all, although there are still many deficiencies in this research, it would be aremedy and tentative development for the former studies on puns. It not only revealsthe dynamic generation process of pun and its humorous effects from the angle of thepun-maker, but also figures out the working mechanism of hinge, double contexts andtrigger during the conceptual blending process. This research provides a newcognitive perspective for the study of puns. Furthermore, this research enables people,especially English learners, understand English puns and American humor properly,thus improve their competence of using English and increase the efficiency of theirEnglish study.