A Study On Humorous Discourse In Sitcom From The Perspectives Of Schema And Conceptual Blending

Humorous language, a salient communicative pattern in human's daily discourse, shows us the significant thinking ability of human. Because of the necessity and affection of people for laughing, humor is attached to unprecedented attention. Humorous utterances can create happy moment, salve tense pressure, and satirize social evil. Humor, a simple transliteration from English, has a special pragmatic effect. Humor has been studied from various angles, ranging from medicine to linguistics, resulting in huge achievement. In view of the fact that humorous language has seldom been studied from the dynamic perspective, this paper carries out a preliminary study of the humorous language in sitcom with cognitive theories to unveil the dynamic process of mental activity of people in apprehending humor. The paper applies the conceptual blending theory (also called conceptual integration theory) and the schema theory to humorous language in sitcom like the canonical and overarching representative Two And A Half Men of English-speaking countries to realize the on-line meaning construction of humorous language.A bunch of scenes are selected, among which several pieces of the comedy are illustrated from the perspectives of cross-space mapping and conceptual integration networks in line with the four types of integration networks, namely simplex networks, mirror networks, single-scope networks, and double-scope networks. This paper applies the schema theory into the analysis of humorous utterances and detects the fact that the schema-refreshing is powerful in the on-line meaning construction from the angles of the traits of the schema theory and the classifications of the theory, including linguistic schema, formal schema and content schema. The paper also finds that background information and cultural knowledge play decisive roles in the apprehension of humor.The paper believes that the application of the above-said cognitive linguistic theories to humorous language entails threefold meaning; for a start, applying cognitive linguistic theories to the analysis of humorous language can achieve a better and dynamic understanding of the meaning construction process of humorous language, which facilitates recipient's command and appreciation of comedies; then, utilizing cognitive linguistic theories to illuminating discourses can provide an evidence of the explanatory power of the theories, which is in the attempt to reveal its strengths and weaknesses in analyzing humorous language; last but not least, schema-refreshing seems to illuminate the triggers of semantic reanalysis of on-line humorous utterances, while conceptual blending appears to present better interpretation of utterances that are in engaging elements or relations from disparate domains.