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摘 要

List of Figures iv

1. Introduction 1

1.1 Research background

1.2 Purpose of the study

1.3 Organization of the thesis

2. Literature Review 1

2.1 Review of previous research on humor

2.2 Review of previous studies on The Big Bang Theory

3. Theoretical Framework 6

3.1 Conceptual Blending Theory

3.2 Conceptual Blending and humor

4. A Conceptual Blending Analysis of Multimodal Humor in The Big Bang Theory 8

4.1 Data

4.2 A Conceptual Blending Analysis of Multimodal Humor in The Big Bang Theory

4.2.1 The blending of situational modalities

4.2.2 The blending of situational and verbal modalities

4.3 Summary

5. Conclusion 17

5.1 Summary of major findings

5.2 Significance of the study

5.3 Limitations and suggestions for future research

References 19

Acknowledgments

The completion of this thesis symbolizes that my college life has come to its near end. Here, I want to express my gratitude to all the people who have helped me overcome the obstacles I encountered in the process of my thesis writing.

First of all, I would like to thank my supervisor, Dr. Xiang Mingjian, who has given me important guidance on the thesis. He has walked me through all the stages of the writing of this thesis. Without his consistent and illuminating instruction, this thesis could not have reached its present form.

My sincere gratitude also goes to all the other teachers for their enlightenment, encouragement, and help during my four years’ study at Nanjing Tech University.

Lastly, I would like to give special thanks to my beloved parents and friends, who always supported me and offered valuable insights through the difficult course of the thesis and moments of my life.

Abstract

Humor is a common phenomenon in everyday life. Humor can fulfill a variety of functions, such as creating a relaxing atmosphere, relieving pressure and shortening the distance between people. Consequently, researchers have explored verbal humor from various perspectives. Obviously, the verbal modality is not the only way to produce humorous effects. In fact, eye-contact, facial expressions and body movements also have a role to play. This thesis aims to explore how different modes interact to produce humorous effects by presenting a case study of multimodal humor in the famous American sitcom The Big Bang Theory from a Cognitive Linguistics perspective.

Drawing on Conceptual Blending Theory (Fauconnier and Turner 1996, 1998, 2002), this thesis gives concrete analysis of prototypical instances of multimodal humor in The Big Bang Theory. More generally, it is found that multimodal humor in this sitcom can be distinguished into two types, which involve the blending of situational modalities and the blending of situational and verbal modalities respectively. It can be concluded that situational modality contributes to humor in American sitcoms and can reinforce humorous effects when it is combined with the verbal modality.

Keywords: multimodal humor; The Big Bang Theory; conceptual blending; situational modality; verbal modality

中文摘要

幽默作为日常生活的一种常见现象，有助于创造轻松的气氛、缓解压力、缩短人与人之间的距离，因此国内外许多学者都对幽默进行了研究, 但他们的研究主要集中在言语幽默上。然而，幽默不仅可以通过言语形式来表达，还可以通过手势、眼神交流、面部表情和身体动作来表达。本文试图从认知语言学的角度，对美国著名情景喜剧《生活大爆炸》中的多模态幽默进行研究，探讨不同的模态是如何相互作用从而产生幽默效果的。

本文以Fauconnier和Turner提出的概念整合理论为框架，对《生活大爆炸》中的多模态幽默的典型实例进行了具体分析。一般来说，情景喜剧的多模态幽默可以分成两种类型，分别涉及情景模态的整合以及情景模态与言语模态的整合。研究得出以下结论，情景模态对美国情景喜剧的幽默有很大的贡献，情景模态与言语模态的相互联合有助于增强幽默效果。

关键词：多模态幽默；《生活大爆炸》；概念整合；情景模态；言语模态

List of Figures

Figure 3.1 Network model of conceptual blending.......................................................6

Figure 4.1 Scene of Example 2....................................................................................10

Figure 4.2 Integration network of Sheldon’s weird smile............................................11

Figure 4.3 Scene of Example 3....................................................................................12

Figure 4.4 Integration network of Sheldon mimicking frightened monkey.................12

Figure 4.5 Scene of Example 4....................................................................................13

Figure 4.6 Integration network of Penny’s inconsistent action with her words...........14

Figure 4.7 Scene of Example 5....................................................................................15

Figure 4.8 Integration network of Leonard’s contradiction of his words and facial expressions...................................................................................................15

Introduction

Research background

Situation sitcom made its debut in American radio in the 1920s. Since then it has appeared mainly on television and become famous all over the world. Most of the sitcoms display everyday life of common people in America and express the emotion of the characters through humorous language use, which can help the audience to relax.

Recent years witnessed the introduction of a large number of American sitcoms to China, among which The Big Bang Theory is one of the most popular among the Chinese audiences, especially young people. The unique style and the vivid performance of the characters in the sitcom is the main reason. This sitcom revolves around four fictional geniuses at California Institute of Technology. The experimental physicist Leonard and the theoretical physicist Sheldon, who rented the same apartment, and their two equally nerdy and socially incompetent colleagues and friends: aerospace engineer Howard and astrophysicist Rajesh. Living in their door is a beautiful blonde waitress Penny, who has a genuine interest in becoming an actor. The four protagonists’ nerdy temperament and high IQ are in stark contrast to Penny’s social skills and common sense of life, making the whole play full of humor, which can be achieved by the characters’ languages use, facial expressions, and body actions.

1.2 Purpose of the study

Humor is a common phenomenon in everyday life. Humor can fulfill a variety of functions, such as creating a relaxing atmosphere, relieving pressure and shortening the distance between people. In terms of representation, humor can be expressed not only verbally but also through gesture, eye gaze and body movements. Given its multimodal characteristic, this thesis aims to explore how different modes interact to produce humorous effects by presenting a case study of multimodal humor in the famous American sitcom The Big Bang Theory from a Cognitive Linguistics perspective. This thesis mainly solves the problems as follows:

(1) How do different modes interact to produce humorous effects?

(2) What is the cognitive underpinning of multimodal humor?

(3) How are multimodal humor comprehended?

1.3 Organization of the thesis

This thesis is composed of five chapters.

Chapter one introduces the research background of the study first. It then presents purpose of the study briefly.

Chapter two reviews previous research on humor and on The Big Bang Theory respectively. It also points out limitations of previous researches.

Chapter three introduces the theoretical framework of this study.

Chapter four analyzes prototypical instances of multimodal humor in The Big Bang Theory on the basis of The Conceptual Blending Theory.

Chapter five is the concluding section of the thesis. It first summarizes the major findings of the study. Then it emphasizes the significance of this study. Finally, it also points out the limitations of the study and posits some suggestions for future studies.

Literature Review

2.1 Review of previous research on humor

There have been many researches on humor for a long time. Researchers have proposed several theories to explain the emergence of humorous meaning. These include Superiority Theory, Release Theory and Incongruity Theory. Additionally, researchers have studied humor in different communicative contexts and discourse genres from various points. For instance, Wang Yong (2001) studies verbal humor from the principles of relevance and points out that combining pragmatic analysis with the Incongruity Theory can inform us how humor is produced and perceived. Zhang Yue (2015) presents a semantic and contextual analysis of verbal humor and concludes that in order to maximize the humorous effect, users should deal well with the relationship between the semantic and contextual levels and apply it flexibly to the pragmatic level.

Although language is considered as a significant factor that can produce humor, it is not the only mode. Other symbolic resources, such as gesture, eye gaze and body movement can also help to create humorous effects. The humor which realized both by verbal and non-verbal means is called multimodal humor. Then how does multimodal humor achieve its effects? Attardo, Pickering and Baker (2011) study the prosodic and multimodal markers of humor in conversations and show that a multimodal analysis is crucial, in some cases, for the proper interpretation of the data and that facial expression, as well as laughter, is a significant marker of humor support. Besides, Attardo, Pickering, Lomotey and Menjo (2013) address the issue of multimodal markers of humor in conversational humor and conclude that no differences are found in volume or speech-rate between humorous pause units and non-humorous ones. Besides, pauses are not found to mark humorous turns and smiling is found to mark humor only in the general sense of “setting the frame” and is not integrated with the humor. Fortanet-Gómez and Ruiz-Madrid (2016) analyze two plenary lectures at conferences on linguistics, one in Spanish and the other in English to explore if there are parallelisms in the humorous elements in each of them. They find that the function of laughter is mainly to draw and keep the attention of the audience, as well as make the content amusing. Chen Qiaoyun and Jiang Guiying (2018) examines multimodal humor through the lens of prototype theory in the framework of conventional incongruity theory of humor. Their research demonstrates that multimodal humor can be accomplished by exploiting the principles of prototype theory, which include the prototypicality/non-prototypicality of category members, family resemblance shared by category members and the vague boundary between categories. Abdel-Raheem (2018) discusses humorous political cartoons contingent on pictorial and textual components and discovers that small visual details, such as exaggerated facial expressions, physical characteristics and clothes, can strike many of us as humorous.

Villy Tsakona (2009) adopts a General Theory of Verbal Humor (GTVH) framework of analysis to show that cartoon humor is not always easy to master fully. Hence, the viewer should take note of all the oral and visual details of each cartoon. Sheng Wenqin (2015) argues that humor is not confined to traditional forms of word play in a static way, such as jokes, palm-talks or funny stories, etc. On the contrary, it has a strong appeal to audience through audio-visual media in a more modern dynamic art form. The author presents a concrete analysis of Chinese audiences’ humor blending in multimodal context, which goes beyond the merely verbal modality to explain the Chinese audiences’ cognitive state while feeling a sense of humor in American sitcoms. This research shows that the situational modality contributes most when Chinese viewers perceive humor in situational comedies. Tian Tian (2016) examines how representational meaning, interactive meaning and compositional meaning yield the humorous effects respectively in Mr. Bean, a famous British sitcom. The author classifies the multimodalities of Mr. Bean into three forms, namely, the visual form, the verbal form and auditory from and finds that the visual modalities, such as color, facial expression, gesture and eye-contact, serve as the main forms of modality in Mr. Bean. Zhang Lei (2015) analyzes humor in the Ice Age on the basis of Zhang Delu’s Synthetic Theoretical Framework of Multimodal Discourse Analysis and tries to find out how different modes work together to create humorous effect. He discovers that visual modes and auditory modes are the two major modes producing humor in the Ice Age. The synergies between visual and auditory modes can be complementary or non-complementary. Similarly, Zhang Yanling(2018) investigates how humor is realized in Disney’s animated Zootopia through the interactions of different modes based on Zhang Delu’s theoretical model. Her study shows that there exist two modalities in Zootopia, named visual modality and auditory modality. The visual modality includes elements like facial expression, subtitle, image, gesture and action, while the auditory mode mainly contains verbal language, accent, tone, velocity, various kinds of sound like the sound of vehicles and the sound of crunching, background music, etc. All these modes create humor when they interact with each other.

2.2 Review of previous studies on The Big Bang Theory

Researchers have studied humor in The Big Bang Theory from semantics, pragmatics and Cognitive Linguistics points of view.

Zhang Lu’s (2011) analysis of verbal humor in The Big Bang Theory shows that most of the verbal humor in the sitcom is achieved through violating the four maxims of the Cooperative Principle, among which the maxim of quantity constitutes the upper ends of the scale of frequency while the maxim of manner constitutes the lower end. Similarly, Zhang Chenxia (2016) examines 1350 video clips of verbal humor in the seventh season of The Big Bang Theory and classifies them into eight categories in view of the pragmatic principles violated, namely, cooperation, relevance, politeness and presupposition. She finds that the violation of the principle of presupposition is used most frequently, followed by the violation of the Tact and Generosity Maxims. This is mainly because the violation of the principle of presupposition involves little cultural background and therefore most people can understand the humorous effects of unrelated conversations made by interlocutors in two different contexts. Besides, although some statements in American sitcoms violate the Tact and Generosity Maxims and are thus not polite enough in dialogues, they do create humorous effects that make the audience laugh. At the same time, the acceptance of impoliteness in the United States is much higher than that in most countries of the world, which leads to the violation of the Tact and Generosity Maxims in American sitcoms.

Moreover, researchers have also investigated humor from the Cognitive Linguistics perspective. Drawing on the Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Conceptual Integration Theory, Zhang Xue (2012) makes a tentative analysis of metaphors in The Big Bang Theory to gain a better understanding of the cognitive process of metaphor. Zhang Fan (2013) discusses the classification of the puns in the sitcom and their rhetorical effects, which include rich connotation and artistic charm. Chen Meiting (2017) uses both qualitative and quantitative methods to analyze representative ironic dialogues in The Big Bang Theory to explore the cognitive mechanism of verbal irony. She discovers that oral irony is supported by a cognitive process that resonate and interpret the previous speaker’s languages. By resonating with the content of satirical discourse, the speaker expresses his negative and disapproving attitude, thus creating contextual effects such as satire and humor.

Additionally, scholars have also examined humorous languages in the sitcom from the angle of translation. Guo Yuting and Han Jianghong (2013) applies Juliane House’s translation quality assessment (TQA) model to analyze and assess the subtitle translation of a scene chosen from the Season Five Episode 24. They argue that the degree of correspondence between the source text and its translation is an indicator of the translation quality.

2.3 Research gap

As can be seen from the above, most researchers only focus on the verbal humor in the sitcom and few researchers have studied humor from the perspective of multimodality. Although language is considered as one of the most important way to produce humorous effects, other semiotic resources, such as facial expressions and body languages are also considered significant. This thesis aims to bridge this gap by presenting a case study of multimodal humor in The Big Bang Theory from a Cognitive Linguistic perspective.

Theoretical Framework

This chapter presents the theoretical framework, on the basis of which the analysis is carried out.

3.1 Conceptual Blending Theory

Conceptual Blending Theory, proposed by Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, originates from Mental Spaces Theory and Conceptual Metaphor Theory. The theory is mainly used to account for meaning construction and information integration. According to Fauconnier and Turner (1998), the basic integration network involves four mental spaces, namely input space 1, input space 2, a generic space and a blended space (Figure 3.1).

Figure 3.1 The network model of conceptual blending

The two input spaces comprise information from diverse cognitive fields, which partially represent elements and frames; while the generic space is more abstract and reflects the organization and structure common to the two inputs. Through the selective projection of elements in the two input spaces, a new creative structure, known as emergent structure, comes into being in the blended space.

In Blending Theory, the emergent structure is produced by three cognitive processes. These are composition, completion and elaboration. Composition indicates the elements of two or more input spaces is projected into blend spaces and therefore form a new relationship between input spaces that did not exist before. Completion means that when the projection structure from the input spaces match the information in the long-term memory, the patterns activated in the blend space is continuously improved by background schema knowledge, cognitive and cultural patterns. Elaboration refers to the cognitive operation of the structure in the blend space according to its own layered creation logic, and the infinite expansion of details according to the layered creation structure by using people's imagination.

3.2 Conceptual Blending and humor

After it put forward, many papers were written under the framework of Conceptual Blending Theory and it was immediately applied to humor. Coulson (2002) gave a detailed analysis of jokes in political cartoons in order to examine how conceptual blending works. She comes to a conclusion that “processes of conceptual blending are shown to be extremely flexible, and consequently, play a central role in the extent to which our concepts change over time”. Delibegović Džanić and Berberović (2017) analyzed different forms of political internet humor and noted that the analysis of the construction of meaning of political humour as products of conceptual integration can reveal hidden ideologies in political discourse. Coulson (2005) examines humor in discourse from talk radio and found that the interactional demands of conversation can be seen to affect the construction of these humorous blends.

Although the previous researches mainly focus on verbal humor, the fact that the successfully used Conceptual Blending Theory in these papers give a hypothesis that the theory can use to explain multimodal humor.

A Conceptual Blending Analysis of Multimodal Humor in The Big Bang Theory

This chapter presents a detailed analysis of multimodal humor in The Big Bang Theory under the framework of Conceptual Blending Theory to explore how different modes interact to produce humor. Here I will introduce the data first.

Data

The Big Bang Theory has released 12 seasons and each season includes 24 episodes except the first season, which has only 17 episodes. The reason why I choose The Big Bang Theory as the corpus of this thesis is not only because it has brought a lot of humor to us, but also it has received many awards due to its humor. Since it came out, The Big Bang Theory has won People's Choice Awards for three times and the actors also won many awards due to the drama.

First of all, I need to choose several typical episodes from the sitcom as the data. I will watch all the episodes and note down the episodes which laughter from audiences burst out most. The transcription used in the analysis comes from the second and seventh seasons of The Big Bang Theory. These episodes will be the corpus of this thesis to analyze how humor is generated in the situation it occurs.

This thesis will analyze the episodes chosen from The Big Bang Theory to find out how the characters produce humor through multimodality. The analysis of the episodes will not only focus on the characters’ language use, but also their facial expressions and body languages such as eye contact, and gestures.

A Conceptual Blending Analysis of Multimodal Humor in The Big Bang Theory

As it known to all, verbal humor is one of the most important form of humor and mainly represent the humor that crucially depends on the linguistic elements. The Big Bang Theory is abundant in verbally expressed humor. For instance:

(1) Rajesh: It’s hot in here. Must be summer.

Summer: That’s cute.

Rajesh: Really? I just made it up. (Season 2 Episode 17, The Big Bang Theory)

This conversation occurs in the situation that Sheldon, Leonard, Howard and Rajesh are in a train to take part in an academic conference in San Francisco while they meet the famous and beautiful actress named Summer Glau. Rajesh and Howard want to have a conversation with her. Rajesh’s remarks have a significant role in the generating of humor, especially the words “hot” and “summer”. The word “hot” in this excerpt has two meanings: “a high temperature” and “someone is sexy”. Besides, the word “summer” also has two meanings in this conversation. It can be used to refer to the season or the pretty actress Summer Glau. Therefore, the sentence “It’s hot in here. Must be summer” also has two implications. The first one is “The weather is hot in summer”. The second one is “The actress named Summer is really sexy.” The specially used puns of Rajesh’s words create humorous effect.

Although verbal humor is still the most important medium that can produce humorous effect. There are other modalities that can help to promote audiences’ understanding of humor. This thesis will give a detailed analysis of humor created by different kinds of modalities.

The blending of situational modalities

Situational modality is one of the modalities that can help to create humor. In this thesis, situational modalities mainly refer to the characters’ actions including the gestures, eye-contact, facial expressions and body movements. Normally, the gestures, eye-contact, facial expressions and body movements of the characters should be in consistent with the languages spoken by the characters. However, in some cases, the actors and actresses will act with exaggerated facial expressions and body languages which cause humor.

Consider the following example from Season 2 Episode 4:

(2) (Sheldon, Leonard and Howard are going to apologize to Rajesh for their inappropriate reactions when Rajesh share good news with them.)

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