On The Laughter-eliciting Mechanism Of Verbal Humor

Humor can be said to be omnipresent. It has been extensively studied in the fields of philosophy, rhetoric, psychology, anthropology, aesthetic and sociology etc.Humor is a meaningful concept. The definitions of humor are somewhat controversial. Some people think it is a temperament, a spirit and an attitude to life; some think it is a personality, an artistic style and an aesthetic form; others think it is a tone, a mind style etc. In this thesis, humor is defined as a cognitive process, which is realized through interaction between its receiver and humorous things, and it is something in our mind and not in the real world.Humor can be classified into two categories: situational humor and verbal humor. In this thesis, our efforts are chiefly made to deal with verbal humor.Scholars abroad have achieved fruitful research results of the mechanism of humor. Plato emphasizes that superiority can cause laughter, Freud regards laughter as an expression of relief, Kant holds that laughter arises from incongruity etc. In the field of linguistics, some explorations have been made in regard to its social aspects, such as strategies of verbal humor (Zajdman, 1995), participants of verbal humor (Norrick, 1993) and social characteristics of verbal humor (Boxer, 1997) etc. In China, it is true that some scholars have done certain researches on verbal humor, but their studies are largely centered on the functions, features, and techniques of humor; little attention has been paid to how verbal humor works to elicit laughter. So this thesis aims at exploring and analyzing the laughter-eliciting mechanism of verbal humor.We find that deviation is the basic cause of verbal humor. Though deviation alone cannot elicit laughter, deviations, when accompanied by a playful attitude, could actively produce amusing effects of verbal humor.That is the laughter-eliciting mechanism of verbal humor.Based on this analysis, we begin to investigate it from the perspectives of linguistic form, pragmatics, logical and value system. From the angle of linguistic form, sound-oriented, lexis-oriented, syntactic-oriented deviations may make language in use humorous. Moreover, verbal humor, as a kind of speech communication, which depends on a particular context and implicature, cannot be understood without pragmatic consideration. We find that pragmatic theories offer us a reasonable theoretical framework in analyzing and understanding the laughter-eliciting mechanism of verbal humor. Our examinations reveal that verbal humor could be elicited by deviating from the maxims of Cooperative Principle and also demonstrate that Relevance Theory could help account for the production and appreciation of verbal humor. According to Relevance Theory, every aspect of communication is governed by relevance principle. However, in verbal humor, in order to achieve the intended humorous effects, the speaker is not always expected to give the most relevant possible information; as a result, the context envisaged by the speaker and the one actually used by the hearer do not agree with each other. A search for a more relevant interpretation worth being processed may be activated on the part of hearer, despite the supplementary processing effort. In the comprehension of verbal humor, the extra processing efforts invested are to be offset by additional humorous effects, by which the hearer will be amused. So the understanding process of verbal humor is actually a cognitive process of interpreting the pragmatic meaning of an utterance deviating from its literal meaning. Our further exploration discovers that people's logical and value deviation can generate the humorous effects.This thesis begins with an introduction of humor, its definitions, classification and a review of various theories on humor in different fields of study. Then playful deviation as the laughter-eliciting mechanism of...