| Humor is a most complex and ubiquitous human expression, maybe one of the hardest subjects to study. As a peculiar language phenomenon, it plays a very important role in English culture. It expresses unique sentiment and artistic conception in implicative ways and finite language. Language expresses humor and also creates humor. Moreover, humor improves the communicative function of language in the process of communicating. For our Chinese English learners, it is a long-lasting problem to understand and use humor. This paper attempts to break through this problem, studying the essence through the phenomena. It uses linguistic approaches to study the realization and origin of humor, helping the English learners to break through this long-lasting problem.During the past hundreds of thousands of years, serious study of or conjecture on humor's mechanism has roped in various disciplinary efforts: philosophical, sociological, anthropological, psychological, and linguistic. Generally speaking, there are three traditional humor theories: Superiority Theory from the sociological perspective, Relief Theory and Incongruity Theory from the psychological perspective. Lately, humor study from the linguistic perspective is gaining its elevation. As two important branches of linguistics, both semantics and pragmatics have explanation for humor, such as Script-based Semantic Theory and Maxims of Conversation. Studying humor from the linguistic perspective is an effective and convenient method. This will lead the humor study from superficial stage to a much deeper stage.Humor study has much practical value. It can increase English learners' interests in learning English and their background knowledge, so we can fully use humor in our English teaching. Recently, humor teaching becomes more and more popular. It imposes a far-reaching influence on second language learning. It can create a positive teaching environment, break up the communicative barrier between teachers... |
PDF Full Text Request