Inhibition And Salience

Verbal Humor, as an indispensable communicative device, has been playing an important role in our life. It can adjust intense atmosphere in communication, alleviate mental pressure, and amend participants'relationship. Up to now, all the researches on verbal humor have been done from perspectives of semantics and pragmatics, which focus on the study of various theories, functions and reasons of humor. These researches contribute to the study of verbal humor, but they only pay attention to the analysis of objective factors and neglect the subjective ones.This thesis, taking inhibition mechanism and salience mechanism as its theoretical foundation, tentatively probes into the production and interpretation of verbal humor."Inhibition"and"salience"have been introduced by linguists to explain some linguistic phenomena. Up to now, few researches have integrated these two mechanisms to study certain linguistic phenomenon. Inhibition mechanism is an important cognitive function in our brain; it adjusts and regulates individual's cognition and behavior. Besides, one of the characteristics of human cognitive capacities is that human being won't process everything that comes forth at the moment. People usually ignore some information but focus on the one which is necessary to the successful cognitive functioning. That is what cognitive salience is founded on. According to Kintsch's Construction-Integration Model, the author holds that there exist construction and integration mechanisms in the process of verbal humor production and interpretation. Inhibition prevents irrelevant information from entering individual's memory or excludes them. Giora's Graded Salience Hypothesis (GSH) admits degree of salience. The more familiar, frequent and conventional the information is, the more salient it is. The author believes that inhibition mechanism and salience mechanism are complementary and they are inevitable mental processes. Inhibition and salience influence simultaneously on input information and then produce proper output information.Through the analysis above, the author proposes Inhibition—Salience Cognitive Model of Verbal Humor aiming at better revealing the mental processes of production and interpretation of verbal humor. The model assumes the following viewpoints: i. cognitive context restricts the content of inhibition and salience. Cognitive context consists of linguistic context and non-linguistic context, and the participants process input information according to their own cognitive context respectively; ii. the process of inhibition and salience between participants takes place simultaneously. These two processes are complementary, and inhibition of some information results in salience of other information. iii. parameters such as speaker's communicative intention and hearer's presupposition play important roles in the process of humorous discourse. These two parameters can influence the process of inhibition and salience; iv. the participants have their own contents of inhibition and salience. Only when the contents of salience are NOT common between participants can humorous effects be created.