A Study Of The Schemata Characteristics Of English Verbal Humor And The Investigation Of Its Interpretation Puzzles

It is a process of cross-cultural communication for the readers with the Chinese cultural background to read English humor. Humor is, from the perspective of cross-cultural communication, a speech act with its content conditioned by cultural factors, with discourse as carrier and words to amuse. It is a unity of content, form and function.According to schema theory, the interpretation of humor needs to activate different knowledge schemata in people's knowledge structure, namely, content schema, structure schema, linguistic schema and pragmatic schema. The content schema of English humor is extraordinarily rich and the subject of humor is most obviously conditioned by cultural factors. Based on the inductive analysis of the subject of English humor, the dissertation goes further to explore the different characters of the Anglos and Americans reflected in the humors.The structure schema of humor refers to the discourse organizational structure of humors in different genre. English verbal humor contains rich and varied types. The main types of humor and their features are described in this paper. As a creative use of language, verbal humor cannot do without language. The linguistic schema of humor is analyzed from the aspect of voice, vocabulary, syntax and writing. Humor is a multifunction speech act with its purpose of amusing the listeners and readers with words and has its unique pragmatic schema, therefore the relative pragmatic theories and principles are also applicable to verbal humor. The misuse of deictic words, the violation of proposition appropriateness, the disobey of coperative principles, as well as the misinterpretation of the literal sense of verbal acts and the set of associative implications, etc. constitute the main content of humor pragmatic schema.Humor interpretation needs certain strategy and the master of humor's knowledge schemata is only the first step. According to the related theories of semantics and semiotics, we proposed that the main task in humor interpretation is to explore four kinds of non-correspondent (discordant) relations, that is the form-symbol non-correspondence, the discourse organizational non-correspondence, the semantic non-correspondence between the concepts and meaning, as well as the non-correspondence between the assessed significance and the standard specifications,the circumstances and the conclusions respectively reflected in the pragmatic level.To better interpret English humor, it is necessary to be aware of the problems in cross-cultural interpretation of humor and the accordingly suggested solutions are needed. The problems mainly lie in the level of language and culture. In the language level, the homophones, spelling and syntactic structure are the difficulties in humor interpretation. In the cultural level, the primary obstacle in humor interpretation is the little understanding of the objects (with national cultural identity) and their associative meanings, the communication methods in the corresponding cultural context, the deep-seated values and ethics rules, and so on. In essence, these problems are caused by the lack of knowledge schemata. That humor contains intertextuality is one of the problems in cross-cultural communication. Intertextuality is not only a part of cultural content schema, but also an important approach of the"language play"and one of the typical features of humorous discourse. To interpret such a humorous discourse, identifying the precedent is very important. There are usually inside and outside discourse markers in the use of precedent in humor. In current English humor, precedents mainly come from television programs, movies, children's literature, songs and political discourse. Besides intertextual content, there is also intertextual genre in English humors. The humorous discourse achieves the unique pragmatic effect by changing the precedent's conventional communicative purpose, audience and content.