从脱口秀语言中看词汇的内涵意义

A Perspective on Connotative Meanings of Lexical Items in Talk Show Discourse

摘要: 脱口秀作为一种以语言为核心表现手段的喜剧形式，其幽默效果在很大程度上依赖于词汇的巧妙运用。本研究以《脱口秀大会》为语料，从词汇语义学视角出发，系统考察脱口秀中词汇内涵意义的类型特征、生成机制及其社会功能，旨在弥补现有研究从“内涵意义”这一核心概念切入脱口秀话语分析的不足。研究首先梳理了内涵意义的定义、特征及理解机制，并回顾了幽默话语研究与脱口秀相关研究的现有成果。在此基础上，研究提出三个核心问题：脱口秀中词汇的内涵意义主要表现为哪些类型？其内涵意义是如何生成和被理解的？这种生成与传播具有怎样的社会批判功能？研究发现，《脱口秀大会》高频使用的词汇类型集中于日常生活与消费类、职场类及心理状态类领域。演员通过语义反转、类比投射和语境赋予三种策略激活词汇的内涵意义：语义反转法打破观众的语义预期，使词汇在反转中获得讽刺性内涵；类比投射法将某一领域的概念移植到另一领域，赋予被投射词汇新的联想意义；语境赋予法则通过特定叙事语境使普通词汇承载全新的内涵意义。这些策略的共同特征在于，通过概念意义与内涵意义之间的落差制造认知冲突，在消解过程中生成幽默效果。进一步分析表明，词汇内涵意义的创造性运用在脱口秀中超越了单纯的娱乐功能，具有一定的社会观察价值。它解构了婚姻神圣性、成长必然性等社会常识，揭示了消费主义对日常生活的渗透，并以喜剧而非说教的方式引导观众反思社会现实。这种“先发笑、后思考”的接受机制，使脱口秀成为一种能够被广泛接受的话语实践。本研究拓展了内涵意义理论在新型话语类型中的应用，为从词汇微观层面分析幽默生成机制提供了参考，对脱口秀创作实践亦有一定借鉴意义。

Abstract: As a comedic genre that relies primarily on language as its core means of expression, stand-up comedy derives its humorous effects to a considerable extent from the ingenious deployment of lexical items. Drawing upon data from Rock & Roast, this study adopts a lexico-semantic perspective to systematically examine the typological features, generative mechanisms, and social functions of connotative meaning in stand-up comedy discourse, with the aim of addressing the lacuna in existing research that has hitherto neglected to approach stand-up comedy through the lens of connotative meaning as a core concept in lexical semantics. The study first reviews the definitions, characteristics, and comprehension mechanisms of connotative meaning, and surveys existing scholarship on humorous discourse and stand-up comedy research. On this basis, three interrelated research questions are formulated: What are the principal types of connotative meaning manifested in stand-up comedy? How is connotative meaning generated and comprehended? What sociocultural functions do the generation and dissemination of connotative meaning serve? The findings indicate that high-frequency lexical items in Rock & Roast cluster predominantly around the domains of daily life and consumption, the workplace, and psychological states. Performers activate connotative meaning through three principal strategies: semantic reversal, analogical projection, and contextual enrichment. Semantic reversal subverts the audience’s semantic expectations, imbuing lexical items with ironic connotations; analogical projection transposes concepts from one domain to another, thereby conferring novel associative meanings upon the target lexical items; and contextual enrichment enables ordinary lexical items to bear entirely new connotative meanings through the construction of specific narrative contexts. The common feature of these strategies lies in the creation of cognitive dissonance through the gap between denotative and connotative meanings, with humor generated in the process of dissonance resolution. Further analysis reveals that the creative deployment of connotative meaning in stand-up comedy transcends mere entertainment value and possesses certain observational functions regarding society. It deconstructs social commonplaces such as the sanctity of marriage and the inevitability of growing up, exposes the deep penetration of consumerism into everyday life, and guides audiences to reflect upon social realities through comedic rather than didactic means. This “laughter-first, reflection-after” reception mechanism renders stand-up comedy a discursive practice that can be widely accepted. This study extends the application of connotative meaning theory to emerging discourse types, offers a reference for analyzing humor generation mechanisms from the micro-level perspective of lexical items, and holds certain referential significance for stand-up comedy writing practice.