A Mode-based Metonymic Account Of Humor In Sitcom

Humor,as a common language phenomenon,plays an important role in daily communication.Because of its humorous utterances and funny performances,sitcom,nowadays,becomes more and more popular.And the popularity of sitcom provides plenty of materials for humor study.Humor research has attracted much attention from many fields such as philosophy,psychology,sociology,anthropology,and linguistics,among which linguistic study does not occupy an important position until late 1970 s.Most linguistic studies have been done from the rhetorical,semantic,and pragmatic perspectives.With the development of cognitive linguistics,more and more scholars have started to study humor from the cognitive perspective.In view of cognitive linguistics,metonymy is no longer taken only as a figure of speech,but also as a basic mode of our thinking and reasoning.Some scholars try to explore humor by resorting to cognitive metonymy,but most studies are limited to pure language symbols while ignoring humor occurring in non-language symbols and multimodal interactions.Therefore,based on the current studies on humor,adopting the cognitive metonymy as the theoretical framework and selecting examples of humor from the sitcom Mom,this thesis attempts to analyze how metonymy operates in different modes to produce humorous effects.By employing case analysis,this study explores the explanatory power of cognitive metonymy for the generation and understanding of humor in sitcom from the following three aspects: mono-modal metonymic account of humor,multimodal metonymic account of humor and the principal functions of monomodal and multimodal metonymy in the process of constructing humor.This thesis analyzes humors in different modes in the American sitcom Mom under the guidance of cognitive metonymy theory so as to make an elementary exploration of the generation mechanism and the interpretation of humors from a new perspective.Through the analysis of those examples,this study draws the following major findings: firstly,different metonymies in different modes all lead to humor.Secondly,metonymic mechanism provides a powerful framework for interpreting humor in sitcom.The prominent concept provides psychological channels for the activation of another conceptual entity through the interactions of verbal,visual,audio mode and different modes in order to create humorous effect.Thirdly,in the process of constructing humor,metonymic mechanism not only serves as a way of providing mental access to the implied meaning,but also helps to activate the addressee’s perception,extend the addressee’s imagination or even build up more humorous effect.Lastly,this study sheds some light on the applications of cognitive metonymy theory both in teaching and daily communication.In a word,cognitive metonymy has great explanatory power in analyzing the generation and understanding of humor.In this way,the application of multimodal metonymy theory is not only limited to advertisements and political cartoons,and it is broadened into a new scope-sitcom.Besides,most scholars interpret humor by using such cognitive theories as frame-shifting,prototype category,conceptual blending and conceptual metaphor while this study interprets humor by resorting to cognitive metonymy theory,so relevant theories of interpreting humor are also enriched to some degree through this study.