A Study Of Verbal Humor In The Big Bang Theory Based On The Relevance-blending Model

Humor, a very common but complex language phenomenon, has numerous functions in our daily life. As a result, the study of humor has been paid much attention to by scholars both abroad and at home. Though various theories on humor are developed in various fields, none of them can fully reveal the cognitive mechanism of humor interpretation. Therefore, improvements and admendments should be done to solve the problem. Fortunately, the development of cognitive linguistics brings the study of humor to a new stage. Relevance Theory and Conceptual Blending Theory are frequently applied to the analysis of humor. It is a big leap forward in the study of humor. However, just as many scholars have pointed out, these two theories are not flawless for both of them have shortcomings."Relevance" and "inference" in Relevance Theory are just general principles unable to display specific mental process of humor interpretation. Conceptual Blending Theory shows the specific mental process with the concepts of "mental space","blending" and "emergent structure" while it is short of some guiding principles. In this case, Relevance Theory and Conceptual Blending Theory are not contradictory but complementary and it is a rational choice to combine the two theories together. Thus, this thesis aims to explore the mechanism of humor interpretation using a combined model—Relevance-Blending Model proposed by Wang Wenbin in2004.To test the validity of this model (how humor is interpreted in terms of Relevance—Blending Model), examples are taken from the data source—The Big Bang Theory. It is a very popular American sitcom, which tells a story about four genius scientists and a pretty blonde girl. This sitcom is chosen for the reasons that it is abundant with very humorous clips and it is quite appropriate for analysis. Besides, this thesis also tries to find out the most general type and the most distinctive feature of humor in The Big Bang Theory.In order to answer the above two questions, the author first picks a total number of210pieces of humor (the criterion of the humor here is the laughter from the audience in the show) from87episodes of the sitcom. Then, the picked humorous examples are categorized into such three types as culture humor, linguistic humor and general humor according to Spanakaki (2007). And based on Wang Jinling’s (2002) argument, the picked examples are classified into six features that are inharmony, incongruity, unconventionality, creative appropriateness, concise implicity and superiority. After the categorization, it is easy to find that linguistic humor is the most general type and incongruity is the most distinctive feature. At last, several examples in each type are picked to be analysed using the Relevance—Blending Model. It turns out that the combined model is very effective to interpret different types of humor.This thesis is just a tentative study and it has quite a few limitations. To make the model better, some further studies should be done in this field.