Humour & The Inquiry Into The Humour Language Of Zhang Ai-ling's Novels

In the early time, esthetics studied humour to some extent, later it became more and more mature that linguistics did that work, these years this research has been developed to pragmatics and cognitive angle.Zhang Ai-ling's novels are famous as its sensibility and interest in the history of contemporary literature, and humour becomes one of the most important features of the style of Zhang's writings. As concerned as the style of language, humour can be regarded as the embodiment of language style "magnificence" of Zhang Ai-ling. The humour style of Zhang's novels is embodied by abundant humour language in surface layer, so it is necessary to do some research to those language from the point of view of linguistics.So this paper combine both:one side try to expand the study area of speech humour into text humour, and strengthen the power of recapitulation and persuation of theory; on the other hand it is hoped it can offer to the exploration of writers' language styles.This paper is composed of three parts altogether. Firstly we summarize the general situation of humour study, especially the study from the point of view of linguistics, also we analyse and explain mental, cognitive and pragmatic features of humour. Secondly, the investigation is deployed concretely by using some rhetoric knowledge and some basic theories of pragmatics, such as conversationalimplicature, politeness principle and so on. this part also is the main body of the paper and it takes up voluminous space.The third part, which is epilogue, is a sum-up to whole paper, relate the linguistic direction and foreground of humour study that current work illumes us.In a word, this paper which takes a brand new angle to investgate author's language, doesn't give priority to theory innovation, but mainly use the fruit of humour study and basic theories of pragmatics.