A Cognitive Pragmatic Analysis Of Verbal Humor In The Eighth Season Of The Big Bang Theory

As a special language phenomenon, humor not only promotes the successful language communication, but also enlivens and improves the interpersonal relationship. From here we can see that, in our daily life, humor is an inevitable communicational skill and a great lubricant for communication. According to the unique quality, ability and skill possessed by human beings, humor can be classified as one of distinctive human’s features. Therefore, scholars and experts from every walk of fields such as philosophy, literature, psychology, physiology, sociology and linguistics, have began to make a multi-scope and diversified analysis and explanation on humor. The achievements of related studies no matter from the domestic or the foreign are all fruitful enough. Based on the classification of humor from perspective of French philosopher Hernri Bergson and writer Author Koestler, the academic field mostly agrees to classify humor into verbal humor, situational humor and cultural humor. Looking through the development of, studies on verbal humor, the studies have changed from centralized, theory-focused but practice-ignored level to diversified, cross-disciplinary and practice-focused level. Recently although there have been quite a lot of accomplishments of verbal humor studies from different fields, there hasn’t been a complete recognition mechanism and process to explain the interpretation of verbal humor. The gradual development of pragmatics and cognitive linguistics offers a brand-new further exploring chance and theoretical perspective to the studies of verbal humor. Among them, it includes the relevance theory and conceptual blending theory, which have been recently taken into practice. Although these two theories to some extent solve the problems of cognition, they are still comparatively rough and not systematic enough to present the vivid mental cognition process and steps of verbal humor. Thus the thesis analyzes the cognition mechanism of verbal humor with the help of referring to the cognitive process of interpreting verbal humor—the complementariness between relevance theory and conceptual blending theory, which was put forward by Wang Wenbin in 2004.The thesis takes American sitcom of the eighth season of The Big Bang Theory as the corpus so as to analyze the production, development and interpretation of verbal humor based on cognitive pragmatics—from the relevance theory, the conceptual blending theory and the complementariness between them. By means of the analysis on verbal humor from the eighth season of The Big Bang Theory, the thesis aims to further explain the necessity and feasibility of combining the two theories after comparing the analysis on verbal humor from relevance theory and conceptual blending theory in order to further put them into practice.The thesis consists of three sections, namely introduction, main body and conclusion.The introduction is mainly the summarization of the theoretical achievements from the domestic and foreign scholars who study the verbal humor. By looking back the current situations and future development of verbal humor studies, the thesis’s aims are to explore the feasibility and creativity of analyzing verbal humor from perspective of cognitive pragmatics.The main body consists of three chapters:The first chapter is literature review. At first, this chapter is a brief introduction to cognitive linguistics, which aims to explain the importance of relevance theory and conceptual blending theory to cognitive linguistics and then lays the theoretical foundation for the further study on the complementarities of RT and CBT. Furthermore, there comes the introduction to relevance theory and conceptual blending theory. Then the author summarizes the definition of humor, the classification of humor and the previous studies of humor; at last, this chapter is a brief introduction and summary to the eighth season of The Big Bang Theory so as to analyze the cultural messages behind its verbal humorous language.The second chapter and the third chapter are the main body of the thesis.The second chapter is made up of two parts. The first part and second part respectively apply relevance theory and conceptual blending theory to analyzing language verbal humor, situational verbal humor and cultural verbal humor in the eighth season of The Big Bang Theory. This chapter aims to further offer both theoretic and practical support for the next chapter, the complementarities of RT and CBT by means of comparatively analyzing these two theories for the analysis of vernal humor.The third chapter consists of three parts. The first part is a summary and analysis on the defects of relevance theory in analyzing verbal humor; the second part is a summary and analysis on the defects of conceptual blending theory in analyzing verbal humor; next the author makes an analysis on the feasibility and necessity of the complementarities of RT and CBT in analyzing verbal humor. After that, the author puts the theory into practice, that is, application of the complementaries of RT and CBT in analyzing three verbal humors, namely language verbal humor, situational verbal humor and cultural verbal humor in the eighth season of The Big Bang Theory.Conclusion is the summarization and review of this thesis. The thesis is the analysis of verbal humor in the eighth season of The Big Bang Theory respectively from relevance theory and conceptual blending theory. Then the author discovers that although there are some advantages and influential powers, which belong to relevance theory and conceptual blending theory in analyzing verbal humor, the monopoly theory still has lack of some certain operative steps and cognitive mechanism. From another angle, the defects of RT and CBT can be complemented based on each other’s advantages. Gradually speaking, there comes the theory of the complementaries of RT and CBT, which can better analyze the special language phenomenon—verbal humor.