A Stylistic Approach To Humorous Texts

Humor, an aesthetic term, means people's capacity to appreciate, cause and feel amusement, and it is used to create a relaxed atmosphere, to avoid conflicts and to criticize inappropriate actions. Humor can be expressed by means of artistic forms, such as dramas, pictures, dances, and songs etc, or linguistic forms, such as jokes, essays, stories and fictions. Humor is widely used in our daily life and humorous texts are seen everywhere, either in some informal occasions such as our daily chats, e-mail messages, etc, or in some formal occasions such as public speeches, written texts, or even political and military affairs, so it is significant for both writers and readers to know more about humor and humorous texts.In this thesis, I will try to make a relatively systematic and objective study of those particular linguistic features and their stylistic effects of humorous texts so that readers may appreciate and make best use of humor, and writers may use it cleverly and effectively.Based on the previous studies, this paper takes humorous texts as the object of study, chooses examples from 6 books, and by means of stylistic approach: description, interpretation and evaluation, investigates those particular linguistic features and their stylistic effects of humorous texts at four linguistic levels: phonology, lexicon, syntax and semantics. Phonologically, rhythm, rhyme, homophony and dialects are often seen in humorous texts to achieve special sound effects; lexically, some neologisms and polysemous words are striking, punny and humorous; syntactically, unusual sentence structures such as inversion and elliptical sentences, are exploited for emphasis; semantically, some rhetorical devices such as metaphor and oxymoron are sometimes employed for vividness, economy and thought-provoking. Generally speaking, all these marked linguistic features are vivid, economical and expressive, contributing a lot to the unique style of humorous texts. We find that humor is highly dependent on context, which can be the co-text (linguistic context) within the humorous texts or social and cultural (extra-linguistic) context outside the humorous texts, and the humorists can make or produce humor at any level of context. Moreover, Humor can help us establish a good interpersonal relationship,avoid direct conflicts with others,save and maintain our face politely so that we can live more harmoniously with others, thus contributing to building up a harmonious society.