The Garden Path Perspective Of Language Programs In The Spring Festival Gala

Although watching the CCTV Spring Festival Gala in the lunar Chinese New Year(the last night of the twelfth month of a year)is a time-honored Chinese custom,the Spring Festival Gala is facing the growing loss of audiences because the audiences' attention has been distracted by the popularity of the Internet and the emergence of multimedia.In any case,the Spring Festival Gala's success owes a good deal to its language programs presumably loaded with humor.Garden path(GP)is one of the essential ways to generate humor in language programs of Spring Festival Gala,as we see,to amuse audiences.GP is a humor phenomenon consorting to textual and contextual ambiguity of various kinds.Usually,there appear first and second interpretation as far as an early part is concerned,and the former one is replaced by the latter one somewhere or at the end of the joke by rethinking.Given an abundance of studies,few touched upon the categories and language effects of the GP in China's Spring Festival Gala.This thesis takes the GP of language programs in the Spring Festival Gala from 2015 to 2019 as the research subject,hoping to solve the following problems:1)What types of GP are used in language programs of the Spring Festival Gala in these years?2)How is GP used in the Spring Festival Gala?3)How effectively or ineffectively is it used?The GP materials for this thesis are selected from language programs(mainly sketches and crosstalk)of the Spring Festival Gala from 2015 to 2019,with 178 examples in total.Since these(or any)GP examples occur at multiple levels or ranks(vocabulary,syntax,pragmatics and discourse),we apply Lexical-Constructional Pragmatics,a compound of relevance-and humor-oriented Lexical Pragmatics and Constructional Pragmatics,for a comprehensive analysis of the generation and effect of ‘Spring Festival GP'.According to the result of the group survey,the humor degree of each GP is assessed and labeled,and the effect value of each GP and the total effect value of GP in each year are also marked by data analysis(the function of Excel).Research findings are: 1)At the lexical level,GP can be generated by homophonic cohesion,word splitting,polysemy,word coercion and semantic substitution;at the syntactic level,besides GP made by the traditional linear features,there is structural implication GP and construction-misleading GP at the pragmatic level,there are eight types: full-reserved GP,semi-reserved GP,double-preset GP,anti-conventional GP,pre-import GP,ambush GP,endowing GP and blending GP;at the discourse level,there are bombarding GP,interactive GP and textual GP.The types of garden paths with superior frequency and effect value are homophonic cohesion GP,word-coercion GP,construction-misleading GP and anti-conventional GP.On the contrary,semantic substitution GP,ambush GP and bombarding GP have poor performance in number and effect;2)The shortcomings of the language programs of the five-year Spring Festival Gala lie in the following aspects: too many inefficient GPs and too few efficient GPs;some GP examples reoccur on the Internet,to quench the expected GP humor;some lack clues for re-reading,hence inability to understand GP on the part of the audience.On the one hand,this thesis provides an interdisciplinary perspective for the research of GP in general,enriching the application of Lexical-ConstructionalPragmatics and the humor research of the Spring Festival Gala.On the other hand,I hope this thesis can help people use GP effectively,to add humor to their own utterance.