Production Mechanism Of Verbal Humor Within Cross Talk Under The Framework Of BE

Cross talk is a kind of Chinese traditional art forms, which reflects and reconstructs people’s everyday life with its own unique artistic techniques. Humor is an essential factor in producing humorous points and amazing audience in cross talk.Conceptual Blending Theory(CBT) has attracted special attention of researchers both at home and abroad due to its strong explanatory power. However,the elements within its input spaces are mainly about conceptual structure. The present thesis attempts to use Event-domain Cognitive Model(ECM) as elements of the input spaces in conceptual blending, and constructs the theoretical framework of Blended ECM(BE) to analyze the production mechanism of verbal humor within cross talk from the perceptive of cognitive linguistics, in the hope of enriching the relevant linguistic studies of Chinese traditional cross talk at home.The contributions and significance of the thesis can be summed up as follows:Firstly, this paper attempts to investigate verbal humor within cross talk from cognitive perspective, and for the first time to put forward the theoretical framework BE, which is on the basis of Blending Theory and Event-domain Cognitive Model, to interpret the production mechanism of verbal humor within cross talk.Secondly, according to the investigation and analysis on the 192 humorous points of Feng Gong and Niu Qun’s 13 cross talk texts, we find that there are 89 humorous points constructed through simplex blending network, accounting for 46.35%, 52 humorous points achieved by single-scope blending network, accounting for 27.08%,27 humorous points produced by mirror blending network, accounting for 14.06% and24 humorous points achieved by double-scope and multiple network, accounting for12.5%.Thirdly, simplex blending network is very common in the construction of Chinese traditional cross talks, even though it may be hardly perceived in human’s everyday talks. In a piece of selected cross talk, if the humor effect is achieved through homonyms or homophones of Chinese characters, its production mechanism may beprobably single-scope blending networks, since cross talks of this kind often contain the words which are identical in sound.At last, under the theoretical framework of BE, interpreting the production mechanism of verbal humor within cross talk not only considers the hierarchy of the events contained in the comic dialogues, but also takes conceptual blending of various domains into account.The present thesis is made up of five chapters. Chapter one briefly introduces the background, motivation, objectives, research methodology and data collection, as well as the layout of the thesis. Chapter two presents a general review of the previous studies on humor and Chinese traditional cross talk. Chapter Three gives a detailed introduction about the origin, development, main ideas and basic blending networks of Conceptual Blending Theory, and the background, theoretical framework, cognitive foundation and principles of Event-domain Cognitive Model are also introduced in this chapter. Chapter Four is the main part of the whole paper and in this part the production mechanism of verbal humor within cross talk will be analyzed in detail.Chapter Five concludes the study, states the limitations and gives suggestions for further researches.