| Humor is a ubiquitous phenomenon in people’s daily life. The study of humor has attracted many scholars both at home and abroad involving a variety of disciplines. From previous studies, we find that most of them are confined to rhetoric technique or based on the Speech Act Theory, Cooperative Principle, Politeness Principle and so on, which ignored the cognitive psychological mechanism of the participants in the process of humor interpretation. Different from the traditional context, cognitive context involves the cognitive factors and is a kind of new concept of context. Cognitive context is highly dynamic and it regards context as a psychological construction and emphasizes context is continuously constructed by extracting the knowledge in the process of communication. This thesis will present a detail analysis of verbal humor interpretation from cognitive perspective.Friends is a widespread sitcom in America. The utterances used in it are humorous and authentic and the performance in it is interesting, which shows representativeness. In this thesis verbal humor is chosen as the subject of the study. Classic humorous video clips in Friends will serve as data for studying the verbal humor interpretation from the perspective of cognitive context. This thesis adopts qualitative analysis to see the relationship between cognitive context and verbal humor interpretation.Based on the detailed analysis of verbal humor in Friends, the main findings are, 1) The three context elements in the verbal humor interpretation including linguistic knowledge, situational knowledge and background knowledge are important to be extracted. 2) The whole process of verbal humor interpretation is coincident with the process of context construction which goes through four stages and finally the verbal humor is successfully understood depending on the suitable context.This study will be helpful for deepening people’s understanding of verbal humor and facilitating communication. |
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