A Cognitive-pragmatic Approach To English Verbal Jokes

The use of humor is a complex and intriguing aspect of humor behavior. The scholars at home and abroad have made studious researches in a variety of fields such as philosophy, linguistics, psychology, aesthetics, anthropology, sociology and literary criticism and so on. Currently there is no major theory of humor made in the sense of something which "explains what is funny, why and how it is funny, etc". Therefore, it would be unrealistic to provide a totally formal humor theory. Our attention will be restricted to humor conveyed in language—verbally expressed humor (VEH) in phonetic, orthographic or syntactic terms. From a cognitive-pragmatic perspective, a theoretical analysis of jokehood generation and interpretation will be carried on so as to further explain the innate cognitive process of humorous effects construction and appreciation..In English verbal jokes, it is the incompatibility or the incongruity between two or more entities (i.e. the setups vs. the joke body and the punchline) that elicit the humorous effects on the joke-hearer and the joke-reader. This thesis attempts a qualitative cognitive-pragmatic study of jokehood—the nature of a joke being a joke, and more profoundly the generating and understanding process by means of an integrated relevance theory and conceptual blending theory model (i.e. the integrated RT-CBT model). The production of jokehood represented in structural, semantic, pragmatic and cognitive layers is mainly owing to the appropriate incongruity and resolution. A theoretical foundation is thus made which will fundamentally explicate what makes people laugh, how and why people laugh. By utilizing this integrated model, correctly understanding and effective interpretation of jokehood in verbal jokes can help weaken more barriers and achieve more success in joking communication.This thesis consists of six chapters. They are organized as follows:Chapter 1 is an introductory chapter, which presents a general definition of humor and verbally expressed humor, its related research and the organization of the thesis.Chapter 2 lays out a brief review of major assumptions in humor theories. Incongruity theory is chosen as the humor eliciting mechanism; and incongruity-resolution is clarified more concretely. In the linguistic field, Raskin's (1985) Semantic Script Theory of Humor (SSTH) and Attardo and Raskin's (1991) General Theory of Verbal Humor (GTVH) make foundations for the two models of incongruity-resolution in verbal humor; moreover, how forced-reinterpretation (FR) joke is constructed will be expounded.Chapter 3 outlines the main approaches—relevance theory (RT) and conceptual blending theory (CBT)—applied in analyzing verbal jokes from the perspective of pragmatics and cognitive linguistics. A compatible approach, i.e. cognitive pragmatics, will be applied as the interface of pragmatics and cognitive linguistics to complement one another's merits and demerits, which stenghten the analysis of jokehood generation and interpretation in Chapter 4.Chapter 4 takes a comprehensive analysis of how the four-layer jokehood (Ritchie, 2004) is respectively classified, i.e. how a joke be a joke. The most outstanding interpretation of humor is the models in the incongruity-resolution theory, on which the four-layer jokehood is generally based. The jokehood represented in structural, semantic, pragmatic and cognitive layers, is not absolutely incarnated in one single layer but sometimes more. And to some extent, it has limitations in that the jokehood represented is not involved all in a joke; by the same token, the four-layer representations are not always necessary and sufficient for making a joke.Chapter 5 is the main body of this thesis. It points out that the integrated RT-CBT model plays a great role in analyzing the generation and interpretation of jokehood. A flow chart shows the correlations between the six-parameter scripts (i.e. Knowledge Resources, KRs) in GTVH and the integrated mutual-manifestness and emergent-structure model. The problems concerned with jokehood generation and interpretation in joking communication can be further solved from a cognitive-pragmatic perspective.Chapter 6 concludes the thesis by summarizing the key ideas of the thesis, pinpointing their possible and feasible contributions to the linguistic humor studies; and figures out the limitations of our study, and finally embraces a broader discussion of the social and practical significance of joke studies in many aspects for future study.In a word, this thesis limits in the classification of joke class and the integrality of the refined cognitive-pragmatic methodology. Most important of all, the future profound approach to humorous phenomena in the studies of cross-cultural communication, discourse analysis, genre analysis, and foreign language teaching and learning, etc. will be refined in the linguistic research of jokehood generation and interpretation. The social value and practical importance will be fulfilled.