A Pragmatic Study On Humor Of Crosstalk

Crosstalk is a special form of our national art and a linguistic art provided withcomedic style. It appraises life with humorous language and makes people obtaininstruction and enlightenment in laughter. Laughter is the lifeline of crosstalk, and acrosstalk that cannot make people laugh can't be called a "crosstalk". Thus, the researchinto crosstalk focuses on that into humor of crosstalk.The process of crosstalk text's creation is communicative one between the author andthe expected audience. The present research focuses on unbalanced story-stylecrosstalk(一头沉故事体相声) and takes crosstalk text as data. It aims to probe how thecrosstatk authors with varying degrees of consciousness build the humor of crosstalk well.A qualitative analysis of data from the pragmatic perspective is adopted.The author of crosstalk constructs the crosstalk humor from three dimensions: humorbuilding at discourse level, at the sub-discourse level, and in the output manner oflanguage, concretely speaking, discourse structure making of crosstalk, cloth-wrappersproducing; distribution and cooperation of speech acts of humor-maker andhumor-assistant, which are the three composing ingredients of the crosstalk humor, and inwhich the choices of linguistic strategies are made. The variable linguistic strategies in thethree composing ingredients of crosstalk humor show the yariability of crosstalk language.Whether the final crosstalk can make audience laugh or not depends on expectedaudiences, which shows the negotiability of language.The crosstalk authors makes the linguistic choice from repertoire according tocontext and makes it possible that audiences feel crosstalk humorous and then laugh,which shows the adaptability to the contextual correlates. This study, through carefullyscrutinizing the data, by reference to the model proposed by Dr YU Guodong, builds aframework of analysis on the basis of Linguistic adaptation Theory. Under the direction ofthe framework, the contextual factors to which the strategy choices in the realm of thethree ingredients of crosstalk humor adapt are classified into adaptation to psychologyfactors (including the communicative intention, cognitive psychology to humor and needfor esteem), adaptation to social factor (involving life experiences).