A Probe Into Verbal Humor Under The Context Framework

Humor is a fascinating phenomenon of human language. It brings laughters and smooths conversation and therefore is seen as an important communication skill. To "crack a joke" is fun thing to do but to explore the nature of humor is a real challenge. Humor arouses the interest of many scholors from ancient Greek to comtemprary times. Many people try to explore the core of humor, "How does humor make us laugh".But the outcome is not enough to make up a panoramic picture. None of the theories seems sufficient and satisfying standing alone. And until today, there is still much space left for us to improve. It is agreed on that incongruity is a key issue to humor understanding and a way we have to go through. And as an art of language, the interpretation of humor depends on its context. Based on the present context theories, the thesis tries to extract the core contexts that possess the most explanatory power over humor mechanism and integrate them into a context framework and apply it.As people start to attach importance to humor research, research from Cooperate Principle (CP), Relevance Theory (RT) and Concept Blending Theories (CBT) are springing up. These researches remedy the traditional humor studies in a dynamic way. But their limitation is that their focus is on the cognitive process of humor interpretation instead of the fundamental factors to trigger laughter and pays less attention to the impact of cognitive competence of the interpreter on humor analyses.The thesis tries to analyze the generation of humor under a new framework of linguistic context, cognitive context and emotive context, exploring incongruity and the burst laughter. The structure of the thesis consists of five chapters:Chapter One is the introduction of the background for this research, research questions and structure of the thesis. Chapter Two is the review of literature on humor studies from linguistic and other disciplines. Chapter Three is the theoretical foundation of the thesis on incongruity and context. Chapter Four presents the framework which is derived from incongruity and context theories and is then applied on a number of jokes to demonstrate its effectiveness. Chapter Five is the conclusion of findings and limitation.