A Cognitive Study Of Humor In Comedy Skits From The Perspective Of ECM~+

As an indispensable part in people's life,humor has been being a hot topic for researchers from home and abroad.As an important kind of carrier of humor,comedy skits have drawn the attention of scholars from different fields since their first appearance in the 1980 s.And among the numerous comedy skits are the works of Zhao Benshan which are treated as the typical example and therefore have attracted the eyes of many researchers.A large number of scholars have done researches on humor with theories from different fields such as philosophy,pragmatics,psycholinguistics,Cognitive Linguistics,Cognitive pragmatics and Cognitive nero-linguistics.And there are vast amounts of researches about humor in comedy skits conducted with the theories of rhetoric,pragmatics and cognitive linguistics.However,few scholar has taken the cognitive dialogic syntax as the framework to explain the cognitive mechanism of the production of humor.This thesis attempts to construct a new model of ECM+integrated by the cognitive theory ECM and resonance in dialogic syntax aiming at offering a unified explanation for the cognitive mechanism of the generation of humor in comedy skits.In this thesis,210 pieces of humorous fragments which are selected from Zhao Benshan's 13 comedy skits in the CCTV Spring Festival Gala from 1999 to 2011 are classified and analyzed with the assistance of data statistics.It is found that:(1)Humor in comedy skits is a result of the progressive propulsion of the superposition of resonances of several pairs of utterance turns.And those whose number of pairs of utterance turn resonances are characterized with the cline of 3(27.62%)> 2(18.57%)> 4(15.24%)> 1(10.95%)> 5(10.00%)> 8(3.33%)> 7(2.86%)> 9(2.38%)> 11(0.48%)= 12(0.48%).It indicates that comedy skit players tend to use the progressive propulsion of less than five pairs of utterance turnresonances to let out the punch line and create humor.(2)The resonance that finally causes humor can occur both between elements within an event domain and between different elements across event domains.And the latter kind of resonance is used much more frequently than the former by the players to produce humorous effect(within an domain 63.33%,across domains36.67%).Seen from the case of the across domains,the level of resonating elements are characterized with the cline of A/B(46.62%)> C/D(31.58%)> E(21.80%)which indicates that compared with the attributes of Actions and Beings and the event itself,Actions and Beings are more commonly used by the players to form resonance so as to create humor.The main contributions of this thesis can be listed as follows:(1)The previous studies about humor in comedy skits take the line contents as static text neglecting the dialogic,international and dynamic nature of conversation.Taking all these factors into account,this thesis adopts the cognitive ECM as the main frame with resonance combined and constructs a new model ECM+ to explain the cognitive mechanism of the realization of humor which provides a new perspective for the study of humor.(2)As a new cognitive method,resonance needs more studying methods and objects to testify its explanatory power.In the present thesis,the application of it to the study of humor enriches its explanatory to a certain extent.(3)In addition,the study of the cognitive mechanism of humor is helpful for people to understand and create humor better so that they can deal with the embarrassment when facing the awkward situation.