An Embodied-Cognitive Analysis Of Humorous Utterances In Chinese Stand-Up Comedy Based On The ECRP Model

As a unique human ability and communication mode,humor reflects human wisdom and creativity,and plays an extremely important role in our daily life.Verbal humor is widely used in various literary works,film and television works and social occasions,and stand-up comedy has gradually become one of the typical representatives of humorous utterances.This thesis finds that previous studies have explored verbal humor from the fields of rhetoric,pragmatics and cognitive linguistics,and that studies on stand-up comedy mainly focus on definitions,classifications,communication,with few scholars providing a systematic analysis of humorous utterances of stand-up comedy from the perspective of Embodied-Cognitive Linguistics.From the perspective of Embodied-Cognitive Linguistics,this study blends the Cognitive Reference Point Model and Construal to construct the ECRP Model to explore the cognitive motivation of humorous utterances of stand-up comedy.By the combination of qualitative and quantitative research methods,the corpus consisting of263 punchlines in the third and fourth episodes of Chinese comedy show ROCK &ROAST 4 is analyzed from the Construal dimensions of selection,perspective,prominence and imagination,in order to try to explain the language features,cognitive generative mechanism and pragmatic effects of humorous utterances of stand-up comedy.The research findings are as follows: 1.In terms of linguistic features,there are plentiful figures of speech in the humorous utterances of the data.In order of the usage rate of figures from high to low,they were vision,metaphor,pun,zoom,acronym,metonymy,polyornament,and repetition.The highest usage rate of vision reflects the characteristics that stand-up comedy is on the ground of real experiences,which is a manifestation of the embodiment of language.2.Humorous utterances in stand-up comedy are formed on the basis of the comedian’s cognitive processing for the real world,which follows the embodied-cognitive principle of ’’reality-cognition-language".Stand-up actors reach a resonance with the audience on the ground by four cognitive mechanisms: selection,perspective,prominence,and imagination(the last two ones account for the majority),thus triggering the generation of humor punchlines,and the process is dynamic and could be summarized as follows: ’’reality<—> ECRP <—> humorous utterances of stand-up comedy’’.3.The humorous utterances of stand-up comedy possess the pragmatic effects of stress-releasing,empathy-realizing and problem-accounting.The significance of this study lies in: 1.From the perspective of ECL,this thesis tries to construct the ECRP model and explains in detail the language features,cognitive mechanism and embodied-cognitive process of humorous utterances in stand-up comedy.2.This study not only extends the scope of the corpus of ECL and embodied-cognitive rhetoric,but also makes some fixes to the blending of the Constual and CRP.3.This study is beneficial for us to further understand the characteristics and culture of humorous utterances of stand-up comedy,and share some ideas for "Chinese culture opens the world".