1.2 Research Questions

Two questions are discussed in the paper: 

(1) Is Embodied Philosophy a more comprehensive and an easier-mastered theory used to analyze humor understanding?

(2) How to analyze English humor with embodied philosophy?

In order to answer the questions, the Embodied Philosophy is introduced generally, and advantages of Embodied Philosophy in humor understanding are listed. Then, the author combines the related knowledge with the present available humor statistics, attempting to analyze some humor speeches based on Lakoff and Johnson’s Embodied Philosophy, especially on the three principles of the Embodied Philosophy: the embodied mind, the cognitive unconsciousness, and metaphorical thought. In this way, the author is able to check whether Embodied Philosophy is a relatively comprehensive and an easier-mastered theory towards humor understanding, and demonstrate how to analyze English humor with embodied philosophy.文献综述

2 Literature Review

In this part, the author firstly briefs on the definition of humor in the present paper, and the classifications of humor: Then the previous studies of humor as well as the problems that exist in those studies are described; and finally the author introduces Embodied Philosophy, the theory that would be adopted for the analysis in the paper.

2.1 Definition of Humor 

Although humor exists everywhere in the world, and the study of it enjoys great popularity among the concerned scholars, it is hard to define humor clearly. Even in the same research field, scholars could not agree on a definition. However, since the paper mainly deal with the embodied philosophy’s explanatory power towards humor understanding, humor in the paper is simply defined as “that quality which appeals to a sense of the ludicrous or absurdly incongruous ”.

2.2 Classification of Humor

Humor is a dynamic system, so there are multifarious standards for its classifications. For example, according to its themes, humor can be pided into animal humor, beauty humor, computer humor and so forth; “according to its forms of expression, humor can be categorized as humorous music, humorous action, humorous picture and humorous language; and according to its recipients, it can be classified into adult's humor and children's humor.”  However, the several classifications mentioned above are so trivial that they may make the study more complex. Thus, to avoid deviating from the study’s emphasis, the paper tends to classify humor into two broad categories---“situational humor and non-situational humor, which are classified by Pochetsov (1981)  ”. (Non-situational humor has much to do with words and language itself, and “there are various forms of humor, such as jokes, satire, pun and so on” ; Situational humor pays more attention to its situations, which means that humor cannot make sense without knowing the its situation.)来!自~优尔论-文|网www.youerw.com

2.3 The Previous Studies of Humor

The study of humor traces back to Plato and Aristotle’s era, and develops rapidly over courses of centuries. Scholars explain them from various perspectives, such as pragmatics, linguistics and semantics. There used to be three frequently used classic humor theories: Incongruity，Superiority and Relief Theories. But here, as the paper is to analyze humor understanding from the cognitive angle, the following part is to introduce cognitive pragmatic studies of humor, cognitive linguistic studies of humor, and the problems that exist in the previous study. 

2.3.1 Cognitive Pragmatic Studies of Humor

Austin’s speech act theory, Grice’s cooperative principle, and Sperber & Wilson’s relevance theory are conductive to the turn of pragmatics cognition study, so it is commonly acknowledged that they fall within the realm of cognitive pragmatic studies. Furthermore, these theories play vital roles in the studies of humor. Many scholars verify the three theories’ explanatory power towards humor understanding, and do make great contributions to cognitive pragmatic studies of humor. For example, Liu Bo (2008)says, “one of those scholars who uses Austin’s speech act theory to analyze humor, concludes that humorous utterances complete general illocutionary acts while practicing the act of amusing” . Liu Fuchang (1987) contends that violating the four maxims put forward by Grice (1975) (that is to violate internal cognition of oneself) respectively could create different kinds of humor. Then Jiang Binqing (2008) points out “the breaking and activation of relevant expectation schemas in communication creates humor” .