Contrastive Study On Production Of Humor In Both Chinese And English

The booming of contrastive linguistics in 1950s gives rise to a new approach to the study of languages. Since 1980s, Chinese contrastive linguistics has experienced a golden stage and has been achieving great accomplishment in this field. These researches, however, focus on the language itself or its branches, for example, contrast in pragmatics of Chinese and English, contrast in styles, in wording system as well as contrast between lexicons. There are few people who apply linguistic approach to humor study which involves multi-subjects such as aesthetics, psychology, sociology and anthropology, and etc. This paper tries to study humor, especially the production of humor on the basis of linguistics. It can fall into the category of comprehensive research for it has some library research, for example, the difference between the origin and history of humor in English and Chinese, whereas there is one part using experimental method to obtain some data to analyze the real difference between Chinese Cross Talks and American comedies. The paper attempts to answer three basic research questions: (a) What are the differences between concepts of humors in English and Chinese? (b) What are the differences of linguistic features in humor in English and that in Chinese (c) Is it possible to find a appropriate way in the translation of humor?The first part of the study analyzes the different definition and concepts of humor in both English and Chinese by probing the origin and history of humor, especially the verbal humor in both languages. The second is an experiment of 5.5 hours recording of humorous materials in both languages for detailed comparison between characteristics of lexicon, the syntax, the rhetoric and cultural influences in verbal humor. The author makes an explanation about the differences between humors in the two languages. Results of the first study show that verbal humor, as a high-class speech act, is quite different from each other in Chinese and English; Results of the second study, which is the most important part of this paper shows the specific feature of humor in either language. The results prove that the ways to produce humor in both languages are similar; the culture and the thought habits are the main barriers of the understanding of humor. We are supposed to adjust the strategy of translation according to some rules to get the best effect in humor translation.The corpuses obtained in the research are Chinese Cross Talks and American comedies. The author recorded randomly 5.5 hours of Chinese Cross Talks and 5.5 hours of American comedies. Then he picked out the points which make people laugh in order to analyze the reasons why people laugh. After analysis of the reasons of laugh, the author tries to clear up the differences between Chinese humor and English humor.