Contrastive Study On The Cognitive Mechanism Of English And Chinese Verbal Humor From The Perspective Of Conceptual Blending

Humor as unique quality, competence and communicative manner of human being, its understanding process can not only reflect people’s perception of the objective world, but also enrich their classification of conceptual systems and feelings expression creatively. In order to give a reasonable interpretation for humor phenomena, it is necessary to compare the triggering mechanism for English and Chinese verbal humor from the perspective of cognitive models and psychological mechanism. Exploring the similarities and differences between two nations will be vital for grasping the target language and facilitating the communication between them.This paper aims to discuss the blending of mental spaces and construction of on-line cognitive mechanism in the process of verbal humor interpretation in terms of Fauconnier’s conceptual blending theory, which will bring the superiority of conceptual blending theory into full play and compensate its shortcomings. Through the comparison of Chinese and English humor verbally or non-verbally, we will refine the similarities and differences of information processing and its triggering mechanism, as well as analyze its reasons behind language, which will provide motivations for the construction of cognitive model.Through our research, we got the conclusion that the similarities of English and Chinese verbal humor are that they are all triggered by “incongruity” to some extent and they are guided by self-consistency principle which is the premise of humor information processing throughout the process of humor interpretation. Under the triggering mechanism of incongruity, the addressees select different parameters provided by the cognitive environment and complete the integration of different spaces to reach the goal of dissolving the incongruity and forming the new emergent structures. The difference situates in that the western verbal humors mostly adopt conceptual default mechanism, while the Chinese prefer the employment of insight mechanism to decode verbal humor effectively and accurately. Our research finds out language, culture and cognition are the major variables for understanding verbal humors. The conformation of these variables will eliminate all the obstacles in understanding the differences of Chinese and English verbal humor to explore an operation mechanism for achieving ideal effects for understanding humor. Therefore, this paper constructs a general cognitive model for processing humor on the basis of semantic script theory.