CIT-Based Humor Interpretation And Its Application To EFL Teaching

As a common way for the daily communication among people, humor represents an important and popular thinking mode of human beings. Traditional humor theories mainly probe the nature of humor, among which, the three classical ones are: incongruity theory, superiority theory and relief theory (Morreall, 1983:4). Most of them focus on the non-cognitive linguistic fields, failing to give an overall account of the production and interpretation of humor. Therefore, a cognitive approach to humor is adopted for analysis within the framework of Incongruity theory and Conceptual Integration theory (CIT) in the present study. It is hoped that the combination of these two theories can make up the weak points of the traditional explanations.Incongruity humorists believe that humor involves the bringing together of two normally disparate ideas, concepts, or situations in a surprising or unexpected manner. It is considered to be an indispensable factor in the production of humor. Conceptual Integration theory suggests that conceptual integration plays a fundamental role in the meaning construction of natural language, and acts an intrinsic mechanism in understanding and appreciation of the humor in this paper. In the integration process, structures from input mental spaces are partially projected to a separate,"blended"mental space. Through composition, completion and elaboration, the blend develops emergent structure of its own. It supposes that incongruity of humor rightly derives from this emergent structure.Based on these theoretical foundations, this paper also examines different students'understanding and appreciation of humor in English classroom by making use of quantitative research. It reveals that with certain knowledge about the CIT, EFL (English as a Foreign Language) teachers can consciously follow this principle and guide students along the way in understanding and appreciating humor. The appropriate introduction of various humorous materials can enliven the English classroom as well as arouse students'interests in foreign language study.