A Study On Verbal Humor In Fortress Besieged From The Adaptation Perspective

Verbal humor which is a quite fascinating linguistic phenomenon has special pragmatic functions. People want to properly understand and use verbal humor. However, because of those differences existing in people's cultural backgrounds, social factors, individuals' emotion and other aspects, it is too difficult for people to understand verbal humor. Many scholars have studied verbal humor from different angles, but their studies have limitations more or less and couldn't get the mechanism for the interpretation of verbal humor.In order to improve this situation, the thesis took Adaptation Theory which was proposed by Jef Verschueren from a pragmatic point of view to interpret verbal humor. Verschueren stated that language use is a continuous process of making linguistic choices and he provided four tasks for describing and explaining language use. In Verschueren's opinion, the construction of pragmatic meaning is finished during the dynamic inter-adaptability between context and language structure.From the perspective of Adaptation Theory, This thesis took good use of verbal humors gotten from a representative selection of humorous novel "Fortress Besieged" as language materials and analyzed them from these aspects:verbal humor is a result of making choices and a result of the inter-adaptability of structural objects and contextual correlates. Finally it concluded:the mechanism of verbal humor's interpretation exists in the dynamic inter-adaptability between structural objects and contextual correlates. That's to say, it exists in the dynamic inter-adaptability between language and context. In this way, this thesis identified that Adaptation Theory could give a strong power for explanting verbal humor. At the same time, it could provide people a methodology to appreciate and use verbal humor. Moreover, just as the Reverence Theory, Adaptation Theory is an innovative theory of pragmatics, but less people pay attention to it. This thesis took Adaptation Theory to interpret verbal humor which expended its using value.