To Laugh Or Not To Laugh

Humor is laughable and amusing, whose linguistic contents may vary from one to another, but are produced to bring about one universal thing: laughter. Nowadays the study of humor has already become a special and independent discipline.In recent years, semantics, cultural linguistics and pragmatics have arisen and developed into important branches of linguistics. The theories of cognitive pragmatics now sharpen our eye and widen our horizon in humor studies. In the literature review, we find previous studies on humor have mainly focused on how the element of incongruity is generated and detected based on the Incongruity Theory, which is not adequate for revealing the cognitive process of humor understanding. This paper, based on the fruitful studies of humor and conducted within the framework of cognitive linguistics, attempts to investigate the English verbal humor and its translation from the perspective of General Theory of Verbal Humor, Relevance Theory and Conceptual Integration.At the beginning, the paper introduces the research motivations research objectives as well as methodology.An introduction to the general study of humor is provided in Chapter One, introducing the basic ideas and concepts of humor, and surveying some of its major theories (superior theories, incongruity theory and relief theory). Besides, the laughter-eliciting mechanism and nature of humor are also mentioned.In Chapter Two, the author spares several pages to explicate SSTH and GTVH to show their importance in accounting for the inner mechanism of linguistic humor production.However, due to the limitation of semantics, SSTH and GTVH can not explain the cognitive mechanism of humor comprehension and translation. Therefore, in the sphere of cognitive pragmatics, the Relevance Theory and the Conceptual Integration Theory are employed to probe into the humorous utterances and its translation in Chapter Three and Chapter Four which are the main bodies of this thesis.Sperber and Wilson's Relevance Theory is a pragmatic theory of human communication. In this paper it is illustrated in terms of the code model and the inferential model, ostensive-inferential communication, contextual effects and...