Research On The Effects Of DM's Use In Humorous Language

As a common linguistic phenomenon, discourse markers are pervasive and can almost be found in any interaction activity. However, it is generally acknowledged that the existence of DMs in verbal communication can not do great harm to the accuracy and integrity of the sentences or any change to the propositional content. In this sense, DMs seem to be the linguistic burdens which can be wiped out from the utterances they occur. Nevertheless the brief remark on DMs made by Levinson (1983) exhaustively changed their destiny. This thesis will study the humorous effect of DMs from a new pragmatic way.In Yang Ping's Relevance-Adaptation, it is said that interaction is a process of seeking relevance and making adaptation to the context, and it pays more attention to the relevance; Ran Yongping's Adaptation-Relevance refers to that communication is genuinely a dynamic interadaptation between the contextual correlates and linguistic structures, it attaches the importance to the relevance. This thesis tries to propose a new pragmatic interpretation model:Relevance-Adaptation-Optimization based on Yang Ping's Relevance-Adaptation and Ran Yongping's Adaptation-Relevance. According to this new model, the understanding and use of the language is a process of relevance, adaptation, and make the best choice on every level of the language structure. First, the speaker's utterance must get the optimal relevance, so that it can be worthy of the listener's effort to process. And the speaker's utterance must keep consistent with the hearer's preference in order to achieve the optimal cognitive effect. Reference presumption is the representation of the external world; these representations mainly come from the adaptation which the speaker makes, and the adaptation is just a process of seeking relevance. The hearer receives the message from the speaker then gets the cognitive effect with the minimal efforts and adapts to the speaker's context to make the interaction successful. Through the bilateral adaptation, the interlocutors achieve the mutual manifest. In order to make the speaker express actually the utterance effect, he may make the choice of the language. Speaker would choose some language forms to attain the communicative purpose while the hearer may select the interpretation of the speaker's utterance, including language strategy, utterance scope, and context so on, in order to obtain the optimal choice.This model can explain three ways of interaction:successful interaction, less successful interaction and failure interaction. This thesis mainly talks about the humorous effect of DMs under this mode. The maximal relevance and optimal relevance are the two points of the Relevant Theory. Humor is a relevant language, and it is an optimal relevance. The humorous effect comes from the contrast between optimal relevance and maximal relevance. The bigger the contrast is, the stronger the humorous effect will be. Humor is divided into verbal humor and situational humor, verbal humor is the humor expressed through language, which includes humor expressed in language and humor created by language. Situational humor is the humor whose amusement must depend on the situation. The humor of DMs belongs to the verbal humor, which mainly comes from two ways, one is from the contrast between the fact and expectation, and another is from the context.Compared with the Relevance-Adaptation or Adaptation-Relevance mode, the R-A-O model is more powerful. First, in terms of language choice, the former only studies the relevance expectation on the level of propositional content, and its adaptation is less comprehensive; the latter discusses that relevance is the prerequisite of the humorous effects made by DMs, and they are as the process adaptation to the context then making the best choice; second, in terms of context, the former just refers to the DMs produce humor through the context adaptation or constriction, and the latter's optimization studies the choice of context is sequential, DM is a marked language, and it may constrain the context then produce the effect; third, in terms of the efforts, for the former one, the interlocutors may try great efforts to produce and understand the humor, and the optimization in the latter model guarantee the interlocutors make the minimal efforts to gain the maximal effect.