A Cognitive Interpretation Of The Humor Production From The Perspective Of Metonymy

Metonymy, as a cognitive mechanism, increasingly enjoys researchers’ attention from different fields by virtue of its great explanatory power on different human languages. Although some of cognitive mechanisms have been studied at length in their relevance in the meaning construction process in humor(e.g. IR model, salience,CBT, etc.), others have gone largely unnoticed(e.g.metaphor, metonymy). This thesis,in an attempt to uncover the inner mechanism underlying the humor production,exerts its full attention on metonymy as a powerful explanatory tool for interpreting humorous text, aiming to present little bit contributions for humor research from the perspective of metonymy. The focus of this study is an analysis on how metonymy works in the process of humor production. Five types of metonymy were specifically applied in elucidating the humor generation based on the corpus collected from The Big Bang Theory, including referential metonymy, illocutionary metonymy, What’s X doing Y, X is so Y that Z construction, as well as textual metonymy.This research is implemented mainly through introspection method in conjunction with theoretical analysis(Talmy, 2007), which is widely applied both in psychological and cognitive area. Linguistic introspection is a conscious realizing process directed by a language user to discover the inner mechanism hidden in his own cognition through language manifestation. Metonymy, a cognitive mechanism, is closely related to the conceptual foundation of human languages. It provides partly explanatory power for humor acquisition through conceptual mapping from source domain and target domain, which, to some extent, lays foundation on resolving the incongruity existing humor production. Therefore, through introspection, human’s cognitive mechanism of interpreting the humor could be partly or fully reflected.The analysis mainly revolves around two aspects: 1) this study tries to explore how each type of metonymy is operated in the process of humor production through theoretical explanation plus figure exposition, thereby a general view wassummarized that metonymy, as a cognitive construal, serves as a unpacking device providing adequate explanation for the occurrence of incongruity; and it should be noticed that metonymy can hardly uncover the secret of such creative language as humorous language without considering such elements into account, as IR model,CBT theory, pragmatic inference and encyclopedic knowledge. 2) this research contributes itself bit to coping with knowing the relationship between metonymic links and audiences’ response towards humor acquisition. Through comparing 6examples cited from The Big Bang Theory within the same target meaning, this research arrives at a conclusion that it is hard to believe that the easier metonymic chains existing the humorous texts, the less mental work needs to be paid, as even if the target meaning is explicitly displayed, sometimes audiences could hardly catch the punchline of a humorous language without giving it a second thought.