A Cognitive Research On The Humorous Utterances In The Film If You Are The One Based On Autonomy-Dependency Theory

Humor is a very common language phenomenon in daily communication, the fresh and vivid feature of which makes language varied and colorful. Humorous language is the humor expressed with the help of linguistic devices, only when language is related with the concrete context can humorous effects be achieved. The main characteristic of humor is wit and fun; another feature is that the humorous utterance is comparatively implicative.The history of humor researches can be traced to the times of Aristotle in Greece. Scholars have studied humor from perspectives of psychology, rhetoric, philosophy and etc. It's not until 1970s did linguists begin to investigate humor in linguistic domain. Most of them made research on humor with the guidance of pragmatic theories and got productive achievements. In recent years, with the fast development of cognitive linguistics, theRelevance Theory and the Conceptual Blending Theory are applied in the humor study. The above studies get impressive achievements in deepening the understanding of humorous language, but do not completely illuminate the generative mechanism of humorous utterances. On the basis of Xu Shenghuan's Autonomy-Dependency Theory, this thesis explores the generative mechanism of the humorous utterances in the film of If You Are the One from the viewpoint of cognitive linguistics. The theoretical framework has strong explanatory power, which has been widely used in various kinds of utterances analysis. But up till now, few researches focus on the analysis of humorous utterance within Autonomy-DependencyFramework. The writer intends to explore the generation of humorous utterance and proves the feasibility of exploiting such theoretical framework to analyze humorous utterances. According to the Autonomy-Dependency Analytical Framework, we construct the theoretical framework of humorous utterance's generative process. The generation of humorous utterance comes from the intentional content one wants to express. Under the constraint of the communicative intention, the humorous utterance is derived from the intentional content by manipulating the relationship of proximity and similarity. The intentionality contains intentional content and intentional attitude, which serves as the implicit expression or the autonomous element; while the humorous utterances expressed by the speaker serves as the explicit expression or the dependent element. The autonomous element is guided by the communicative intention, making use of the relation of proximity and similarity to derive the dependent element; the means for the derivation is nipping-along. The existence and operation of the dependency is guided by the autonomy's intentionality, and the application of the dependency should reflect the autonomy's intentionality. In some given situation the dependency can be reverted to the autonomy.The thesis firstly tries to make use of the Autonomy-Dependency Analysis Framework to analyze the generative process of humorous utterance, and the corpus comes from the comedy If You Are the One. Through analyzing, we expound the autonomy-dependency relationship between the communicative intention and humorous utterance, and to a certain extent get the generative mechanism of humorous utterance. But there are still some limitations in our study. We merely provide a possible interpretation and explore some kinds of humorous utterances, and whether the mechanism is adequate for other kinds of humorous utterance needs further investigation.