| Harry Potter is a series of seven fantasy novels written by the British author J. K. Rowling, which contains a plenty of humorous language expressions and fictional characters. Humor is a complicated cognitive and pragmatic phenomenon and its history can be traced back to ancient Greek. Many world-famous scholars such as Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Freud, Attardo have extended great interest in such a phenomenon. Previous researches on humor have been conducted mainly from sociological, psychoanalytic and cognitive perspectives, which have yielded a variety of influential research products such as the classic humor theories of Superiority Theory, Incongruity Theory and Relief/Release Theory. So far, domestic and foreign scholars have done a lot of reseaches on Harry Potter. However, they have seldom touched upon its humorous language, especially from cognitive and pragmatic perspectives. To fill such a gap, this present thesis is aimed to interpret the humorous language in Harry Potter series within the theoretical framework constituted by Incongruity-Resolution Theory and Relevance Theory.According to the Incongruity-Resolution Theory, humor is perceived at the moment of realizing the existence of incongruity. The understanding of humorous messages involves a three-step process, that is, Setup-Incongruity-Resolution, which is called SIR model. But to some scholars, the incongruity and resolution steps happen simultaneously and are integrated together. In the humorous snatches of conversations chosen from Harry Potter series, cognitive incongruity, semantic incongruity, logical incongruity and psychological incongruity are revealed in detail in the interpretation of the machanisms for humor formation. The resolution of humor incongruity in Harry Potter is a process of frame-shifting and conceptual integration. In the process of humor interpretation, the humor perceivers first try to construct a frame-based representation of the inputted sentence meaning, which, however, results in a cognitive, psychological, semantic or logical incongruity with what they have expected or understood, and then they shift from the old frame to a new one in order to resolve the incongruity. Besides, resolution of humor inconguity is also a subconscious process which involves the integration or blending of some concepts originating from different mental spaces.From the perspective of Relevance Theory, the humorous conversations in Harry Potter also belong to a kind of ostensive-inferential communication, which involves the speaker's ostension of his informative and communicative intentions and the hearers'inference of the speaker's communicative intention of humor construction through the combination of the encoded linguistic message and the contextual assumptions drawn from their cognitive environments. The writer of Harry Potter series makes her communicative intention of constructing humor and eliciting laughter manifest to the readers through producing a variety of ostensive linguistic stimuli to establish a cognitive, psychological, semantic or logical incongruity while the readers get the contextual effect or humorous effect of the conversations in Harry Potter through the relief of the cognitive, psychological, semantic or logical incongruity. The humor communicator of Harry Potter is oriented towards optimal relevance rather than maximal relevance.This thesis is concluded by pointing out that the working mechanism for humor production and interpretation is a problem worthy of more extensive and penetrating researches and extending the hope that the present research could make some contribution to the readers'better understanding of the humor feature in Harry Potter and to the extension of the research fields of Harry Potter series. |
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