Study On Humor Discourse Production Mechanism From The Perspective Of Conversational Analysis

Humor has been a heated topic in many different fields. The research into humor actually can be dated back to ancient Greece. Since then, philosophers and scholars put forward different ideas from the perspective of psychology or sociology. The research from the angle of linguistics started in 1980s. Much have been done from the perspectives of sociolinguistics, pragmatics, psycholinguistics, and rhetoric and so on. Fruitful achievements have been made. But research on humor discourse production mechanism from the perspective of the conversational analysis is rare. The present study is carried out on conversational analysis theory advanced by Sacks, E.A. Schegloff & G. Jefferson in A Simplest Systematic for the Organization of Turn-taking for Conversation. It takes an American sitcom Friends and two popular Chinese sketches as data to explore humor discourse production mechanism.This study answers three questions:(1) At the macro-level, what roles do the transition-relevance place and turn design play in producing the humor discourse? (2) At the micro-level, what roles do the organization structure namely, adjacency pairs, sequences, dispreference organization and repair practices play in producing the humor discourse? (3) What mechanism of humor discourse production can deduced?Through the research, the author has found:(1) From the macro-level, the consideration of the transition-relevance place and turn design are the precondition to produce the humor discourse. (2) From the micro-level, firstly, the absence of the second part of an adjacency pair and the intersubjectivity between the first part and the second do not always influence interaction between the speaker and hearer; on the contrary, they can create the opportunity for the speaker to produce humor discourse. Secondly, sequences especially insertion sequence has two main functions:expanding the topic and digressing from the topic. Expanding the topic can be carried out by the insertion sequence of relevance to it and digressing from the topic can be implemented by the insertion sequence as topic shifts, both of which can help the speaker to produce humor discourse, especially in tense atmosphere. Thirdly, dispreference organization is the best assistance to help the speaker to produce humor discourse. It consists of two major forms, turn-initial delay and token disagreement. The speaker can use these two major forms to produce the humor to avoid the embarrassed atmosphere. Fourthly, conversational repair is also a method of producing the humor. Both other-initial & self-repair and other-initial & other-repair produce the humor by using homophones. (3) A mechanism of humor discourse production has been proposed and testified to some extent by analyzing some Chinese popular sketches by Zhao Benshan.