A Study Of The Two-step Interpretation Mechanism Of Verbal Humor With Examples From The Spring Festival Gala's Sketches

Verbal humor is a special form of the verbal communication,and it has been extensively studied in the fields as philosophy,rhetoric,psychology,anthropology,sociology and linguistics.Scholars have achieved fruitful results in the research of humor.However,previous studies have neglected to study in detail the definition and the connotation of verbal humor,and have failed to provide systematic analyses on the interpretation process of verbal humor according to its definition and characteristics.By beginning with the definition and characteristics of verbal humor,this thesis has made a systematic analysis of the interpretation mechanism of verbal humor under the guidance of conceptual blending theory and relevance theory.On the basis of the definition of humor,the thesis first defines verbal humor as a special linguistic feature of speech which makes it sound fantastic,funny and interesting to the speech receiver and causes him to burst into laughter.According to this definition,the connotation of verbal humor falls into two parts: the special linguistic feature of speech and the receivers' reaction to verbal humor.If laughter is taken as the symbol of verbal humor,then special linguistic feature of verbal humor is the initiator of laughter,stimulus of laughter for short;and the receiver's reaction of verbal humor is the outcome of verbal humor,outburst of laughter for short.Then the thesis has investigated the characteristics ofverbal humor.The result of the investigation reveals that verbal humor equips itself with interior and exterior characteristics.The interior characteristics are the intrinsic features of stimulus of laughter in verbal humor,which correlates to the speaker and reflects the informative intention of the speaker.They are manifested specifically by the speaker's making use of various linguistic means to create abnormal meaning of verbal humor.The exterior characteristic is the outside reflection of outburst of laughter,which is related to the verbal humor receiver and displays the effect of the speaker's utterance meaning.To be more specific,the verbal humor receiver obtains through cognitive efforts the expected comprehension and sudden enlightment of the abnormal utterance meaning and the apparent semantic conflict between the abnormal utterance meaning and the mutual knowledge of conventions in the cognitive context.On the basis of the definition and characteristics of verbal humor,the thesis proposes a two-step interpretation mechanism of verbal humor.The two-step mechanism means that two steps are involved in the interpretation of verbal humor.The first step involves the interpretation of stimulus of laughter,which can be explained with conceptual blending networks.It means blending the utterances of the speaker to get the abnormal utterance meaning,namely,stimulus of laughter.The second step involves the interpretation of outburst of laughter.Specifically,this thesis uses cognitive inference to reason out the semantic conflict between the abnormal utterance meaning and the mutual knowledge of cognitive context.The obvious conflict with ourcommon knowledge makes the speech funny,absurd and amusing,and the result of the sudden enlightment to this obvious conflict is an outburst of laughter for fun.Based on the two-step interpretation mechanism it proposes,the thesis has interpreted the verbal humor in some of the Spring Festival Gala's sketches.The result shows that this mechanism is both valid and applicable for the interpretation of verbal humor.