The Study Of American Verbal Humor From The Perspective Of Conceptual Blending Theory

The study of humor is not a new topic,and many scholars have made a lot of systematic studies from different perspectives.However,in the aspect of cognition,not many studies of humor are made.The Big Bang Theory,which is a popular situation sitcom,is selected as the corpus of this research,and the humorous utterances in this sitcom will be analyzed by using the Conceptual Blending Theory.The purpose of this research is not only to explore the application of Conceptual Blending Theory in real context,but to provide the reader with a clearer dynamic cognitive process of humor.First,the author randomly selected six episodes from the first season to sixth season in the Big Bang Theory after screening reserved effective verbal humorous utterances,and by using the Bergson’s method,these verbal humor utterances are divided into three types:word game humor,cultural verbal humor,and situational verbal humor.These three kinds of verbal humorous utterances were reclassified into twelve types in accordance with four basic network structures in the Conceptual Blending Theory.Finally,only one sample was randomly selected from these twelve kinds of verbal humorous utterances,and these twelve samples will be analyzed by using the basic network structure diagram.After the detailed analysis of selected corpus,the author drew some conclusions as follows:1)Most of verbal humor in the Big Bang Theory belongs to situational humor,so people,who come from non-English speaking countries,without enough cultural background information also can understand the humor in this sitcom.2)After the mapping and projection among four spaces,there are three necessary steps:composition,completion,elaboration for producing humor.3)When people decide which basic network should be selected to analyze the verbal humor,they must have a clear understanding about the frameworks and elements in two input spaces,and then analyze whether these two frameworks are same organizational framework.4)The Conceptual Blending Theory can give a clear explanation about the dynamic process of verbal humor generation.