A Linguistic Study Of Ironical American Military Humor

This thesis, based upon the American military humors obtained mainly from the Internet, is aimed to expose the status quo of the ironical American military humors and how the ironical effect is realized or achieved in the context of the American military humorous text. Mainly, the research is conducted to answer the following three questions: (1) In what pattern the current ironical American military humors are distributed? (2) How does the ironical feature is achieved by means of various strategies and devices? (3) Is there a certain interaction between the ironical effect and the humorous degree among the ironical American military humors?Confronted with these questions, the researcher of this thesis made a comprehensive study of the ironical American military humors, aimed to investigate the status quo of the ironical American military humors and how the ironical effects are achieved in the linguistic context of humor. Before the study was made, an introduction and discussion of the major theories and studies relevant to the study of humor was presented. In particular, the linguistic approaches were elaborated and the major concepts were delineated. The major tendency and the deficiency in all the studies were also pointed out. Then, the methodology used in the study was introduced, involving the major research questions, the source or data, the data gathered, the participants, the research procedure, instrument, and the reliability and validity of the test. Following all this is the main part of the research, which was conducted in the following way: firstly, a large body of American military humors was gathered and a classification of their being higher or lesser ironical in terms of ironical effect was made. Thus all the themes ridiculed by the humors marked with ironical feature were counted and a sequence of their percentage in the whole ironical American military humors was presented. Secondly, major strategies used to realize the ironical effect employed in those ironical American military humors were singled out and discussed. Finally a correlative study between the ironical effect and humorous effect was made in terms of their degrees in each of the 30 humors selected for the study. The major findings of the research are presented as follows:1. Themes ridiculed by the ironical American military humors mainly are: Military Issues and Political Issues. For military issues, The image the American Armed Forces (Army, Air Forces, Navy, Marine Corps), The Relation between American Officers and Soldiers (Officers (Officers in General, General & Admiral, Colonel, Major), Soldiers (Soldiers in General, Sergeants)) , The Recruitment and Service in the Army (Enlistment and Recruitment, Service in the army) are themes mostly likely to be ridiculed. For the latter, Views towards Government Leaders and Organizations, Views toward Other Countries and People (Views towards Others Countries(France; China; Iraq) ) , and Views towards People(Saddam Hussein, Taliban and Bin Laden) tend to be ridiculed.2. In the formulation of ironical American military humors, the following strategies and devices are employed:(1). A general but necessary and sufficient strategy: Achieving the negating of semantic frame.(2). Three other possible sub-domain strategies:a. Textual Strategies: (i) Selection of theme; (ii) Selection of genre; (iii) Selection of sentence with Peculiar Mood; (iv) Selection of the Shape of the Text Bodyb. Rhetorical Strategies: (i) Contrast; (ii) Irony; (iii) Lexical Repetition; (iv) Metaphor.c. Semantic Strategy: To achieve a semantic ironical textual frame familiar to the readers in the construction of humorous text3. There is no significant correlation between the ironical effect and humorous effect of the ironical American military humors. There is only a potential tendency that the degree of ironical effect will be affected by that of the degree of humorous degree and vice versa and an increase of the humorous degree tend to give rise to the escalation of the ironical degree, thus achieving more ironical effect.Finally, conclusion of the thesis is drawn and the significance of the study is specified. Before the thesis comes to the end, a discussion of the limitation of the current study is made and suggestions for future studies are also presented.It is hoped that the current study will throw some light on the understanding of both the American military humor and humor itself as well. Meanwhile, it also opens a window for people to know the American military culture and life. Furthermore, it will benefit the implementation and study of psychological and media operation. In particular, in the design of ironical humors targeted at the United States armed forces, the themes highly ridiculed, the commonly used strategies and devices and the degrees of the humorous effect of the humorous text may be considered.