The Coherence Function Of Discourse Intention In Verbal Humor

Discourses in humor always appear to be incoherent or digressive at the first sight, while coherent and instructive with deep thinking, exploring the reason for this phenomenon is just the purpose of the present research.The research of humor is an interdisciplinary subject connected with a wide range of learning. Up to now, a great deal of research has been done from the viewpoints of philosophy,psychology and sociology. As a result, a lot of influential theories on humor have been produced. After the classification and comprehensive review of the perspectives on humor research done by previous researchers at home and abroad, we find that their research mainly touched upon the following perspectives: the appreciation and comprehension of humor, the generation of humor, the function of humor, the classification of humor. But a vacancy appears to be left in the research on the coherence of humor. To fill the vacancy is just what the creation and significance of this paper lies.Based on the above remarks, the target of the present research is essentially the coherence of humor. As the coherence in humorous discourses belongs to the scope of implicit coherence, we make a discussion on the features of implicit coherence and the factors affecting it. Implicit coherence is mainly influenced by some external factors such as the context of culture, context of situation, cognitive model and mental thought, of which either the cognitive model or mental thought is closely related to the communicator's intention. According to the view of this thesis, the process of comprehending the coherence of humorous discourse is just the process of finding the communicator or the humor-maker's discourse intention.After reviewing and summarizing the main ideas of the former scholars on intention, we form our own ideas about intention and take it as the theoretical framework in this paper. To achieve the coherence by inferring the speaker's intention is the basic train of thought to explain the coherence of humorous discourses. In the last chapter we analyze by exemplification how intention affects the coherence of humor. What's more, the interactions of intention with two other external factors of implicit coherence are also discussed.