Towards An Interpretational Model Of Verbal Humor In Xiangsheng

Xiangsheng is a traditional Chinese bantering-style dialogue and verbal art which typically employs two performers who make comical speeches, employing exaggeration and irony. It is a speaking and singing art with serious intents contained in humor, thus bringing people spiritual benefits and happy smiles. It is greatly welcomed and liked for its highly exaggerating, highly refined and highly humorous language. Before liberation, people did not give much attention to Xiangsheng because it was only a way of living for some uneducated people within a limited scope. It is not until liberation that it was accepted by people from all walks of life and it has been getting higher and higher status ever since. Nowadays it is attracting more and more attention from scholars in different fields such as linguists and Xiangsheng artists and theorists. Due to the uniqueness of Chinese culture and language, the research of Xiangsheng is deeply confined to Chinese scholars. In the west, we are still looking forward to some fruitful achievements in this area though there have already been a long history of research in humor with abundant literature from philosophy, aesthetics, sociology, anthropology, psychology etc. In China, mainly two groups of people are doing research in Xiangsheng, one group including actors and artists engaging in the performance and theoretical study of Xiangsheng (such as Hou Baolin, Xue Baokun, Ma Ji, Wang Jingshou, Teng Tianxiang, Feng Gong) while the other group comprising linguists and other scholars (such as Gao Yulan, Chi Changhai, Long Qianhong, Xu Lan). These two groups of people study Xiangsheng from quite different angles: one from its history, its development, its linguistic features, its creation, existing problems and its future development; the other from its humorous language in the light of some linguistic and pragmatic theories such as speech act theory, Grice's Cooperative Principle, Sperber and Wilson's Relevance theory. On the whole, the research of verbal humor in Xiangsheng is still in its preliminary stage whether in quality and quantity.This thesis attempts to work out an interpretational model of verbal humor in Xiangsheng based mainly on Grice's Cooperative Principle (CP) together with other theories. The main purpose is, first of all, to test the interpretive force of relevant linguistic theories (especially CP) on verbal humor in Xiangsheng, then to summarize its requirements of application and contextualize Grice's four maxims and finally track down an interpretational model. In other...