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The Study of the Classical Humorous Lines of the TV Series Named Who Calls the Shot of My Youth from the Perspective of Cognitive Context

Author: DaiSuMin
Tutor: ZhangYingLin
School: Central China Normal University
Course: Foreign Linguistics and Applied Linguistics
Keywords: Cognitive Context the Classical Humorous Lines of Who Calls the Shot of my Youth Incongruity Mental Schema Cognitive Domain
CLC: H13
Type: Master's thesis
Year: 2011
Downloads: 244
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Abstract

It is regarded that context contributes positively and greatly to the interpretation of utterance in daily life. It is same with the interpretation of verbal humor. As an art of human language, humor is so common and pervasive in daily life that it has attracted the attentions of the scholars from home and abroad, according to whom, the most popular theories are superiority, relief and incongruity. However, being a broad and multi-principle scope, the study of humor is far from satisfactory. According to the former study, most of the scholars focus the study of humor on perspective of the rhetoric manner or the traditional Pragmatics, which ignores the internal processing mechanism of perceiving it. Based on the increasing popularity of cognitive science, in this thesis, the author attempts to study the mental mechanism in perceiving the 25 humorous lines of the Chinese popular TV series Who Calls the Shot of My Youth from the perspective of cognitive context.According to the scholars from home and abroad, He Zhaoxiong summarizes that the study of context develops from the monistic approach to pluralistic approach, which refers to the fact that it changes from the pure linguistic context to the cognitive context that includes various elements. After the general literature review about the theory of traditional context and cognitive context, based on the cognitive context in the broad sense, the author recategorizes the elements as follows:linguistic context (the co-text), which includes the pronunciation, spelling, grammatical rules etc; situational context that concentrates on the field of discourse, the tenor of discourse and the mode of discourse; the background knowledge of the participants such as the historical and cultural knowledge, the encyclopedia knowledge, and the different personal cognitive abilities and experiences etc. What’s more, to make the analysis of the mental mechanism in perceiving humor more persuasive, the author applies the psychological terms such as script, frame, mental schema and cognitive domain into this data analysis.Based on the theoretical framework about humor, cognitive context and psychological representation in chapter 2, in the main part of this thesis, the author elaborates the cognitive mechanism in the process of understanding the humorous lines in the popular play Who Calls the Shot of My Youth from the following aspects one by one:the linguistic context, the situational context and the background knowledge of the participants. Through the detail qualitative analysis, it well proves the fact that the utterance itself is not humorous unless under the cognitive context of the participants. It is the mental schema in cognitive context which is stored in people’s memory that makes the perceiving of humor possible. Stimulated by the input of utterance, people tend to build a certain context and form some expectation to match with it, however, when the congruity is broken by the actual words or behavior of the characters in the play and the speakers allow the exist of it, the humor is sensed. On the whole, it is the mismatch and incongruity between the normal hypothesis and expectation governed by the cognitive context and the actual utterance and behavior of the characters in the play that produces the humor. Therefore, if people are absent with certain cognitive context and psychological representation for the understanding of the humor, it will be difficult for them to perceive the humor. What is more, this dissertation is of great significance in widening the theory about cognitive context, better illustration of the function of cognitive context in showing the personality and interrelationship of the characters in the TV series and improving people’s capacity of producing and perceiving of verbal humor in daily life.

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