The Exploration Into English Humor From The Perspective Of Discourse Analysis

Humor exists everywhere. It is a ubiquitous human activity that occurs in all types of social interaction. Humor appears everywhere such as in our daily communication, mass media, and books. Nearly every aspect of our life is flooded with different kinds of humor. Different people, regardless of the education background, marriage status, sex, nationality, religion and political belief, respond to humors delightfully. Humor is a language phenomenon and an art of language. It has long been the concern of numerous researchers. These researchers try to study humor from different angles, such as philosophy, aesthetic, psychology, anthropology. Recently, the research of humor has been the linguists’ concern. Humor is a specific characteristic of human. Also language is peculiar to human’s communication. The creation and expression of humor needs the help of language.So the study of humorous discourse can help us get a better understanding of humor.Usually, the linguists study humor from the perspective of rhetorical devices, cooperative principle and theory of relevance. But it is difficult to reveal the overall linguistic mechanism of humor. This thesis aims at analyzing humor from the theory of discourse by studying the cultural context of humor, cohesion and coherence, the systemic-functional grammar and the context in humorous discourse. It tries to study the humor from a different angle.