A Pragmatic Study Of Self-Mockery

Self-mockery, as an indispensable communicative device, has been playingan important role in our life. It can adjust intense atmosphere in communication,alleviate mental pressure and amend participants’ relationship. Up to now, all ofthese researches in China about self-mockery discourse are conducted from theperspective of social communication and literacy appreciation which focus onthe analysis of the communicative functions and the implied self-mockeryconsciousness in the literary works. These researches contribute to the study ofself-mockery discourse, but they are confined to the social communication valueand neglect the production and interpretation mechanism of self-mockery. Underthe framework of cognitive pragmatics, this thesis aims to apply Incongruitytheory and relevant theory to make an analysis of social communication valueand pragmatic essence of self-mockery. It pays more attention to the pragmaticelements and the production and interpretation mechanism in order to open anew road for self-mockery research and better apply and interpret self-mockerydiscourse.Four chapters compose this thesis. Chapter one gives a brief account ofself-mockery and incongruity theory, which especially introduces the historydevelopment, the relevant mode and application on incongruity. In chapter two,the self-mockery discourse is further studied from pragmatic perspective.Moreover, these pragmatic elements such as the definition, classification andrestricted conditions and particularly the pragmatic features, devices andpragmatic functions are explored. Chapter three applies the incongruity theory toanalyze the production mechanism of self-mockery discourse. On the analysis ofproduction mechanism, this thesis at first introduces the concept ofrepresentation, and then makes a further research from relationship amongrepresentation, incongruity and self-mockery discourse. From this part, it isconclude that under the influence of incongruity kernel, the languagerepresentation and psychological representation of self-mockery discourse haveasymmetry, which directly act as the communicative intention inconsistent withthe intentions of the information, representing the discrepancy of self-mockery pragmatic effects. Chapter four combines the incongruity theory and the relevanttheory to interpret the processing of self-mockery discourse. Incongruity theoryhighlights the inconsistent and disharmonious factors to simulate thereconstruction of information, but the interpretation is not clear and specificwhen analyzing the accepting and understanding discourse of the audience. Therelevant theory has an edge in the analysis of discourse interpretation. Thisthesis argues that incongruity theory and relevant theory are complementary andintegration of incongruity theory and relevant theory can explain self-mockerydiscourse more efficiency. Based on the incongruity theory, the recipients needto pay extra processing efforts during understanding self-mockery discourse, atthe same time that can get the extra cognitive effect that is the special emotionexperience from expectation failure to the release of pent-up emotion.Based on the above research, this thesis concludes the following points:1.self-mockery as a pragmatic behavior, its outstanding pragmatic features mainlycontain incongruity, relative exclusiveness, indirectness and counter-expectation;its devices mainly refer to bifurcation, shift, interference, degradation and a slipof tongue; its restricted conditions summarize as the vagueness as well as thespeaker’s non-sincerity and the relative non-authenticity of proposition; itspragmatic function is diversity.2. During the production and interpretation ofself-mockery discourse, psychological representation and linguisticrepresentation of self-mockery are asymmetric, which directly perform as theinconsistency of the communicative intention and information intention.Whether the communicative purposes inferred by the recipients can be matchedwith the original intention, which will produce three results:1) if both arecompletely matched, it will result in complete or full self-mockery effects.2) Ifparts are matched, it will produce partial self-mockery effect.3) If both are notmatched, it will cause the failure of communication.3. During the interpretingself-mockery discourse, the recipient needs to pay extra processing efforts,which also increase the recipients’ cognitive effect.The extra cognitive effectfrom this course is a special emotion experience from expectation failure topent-up emotion release for the recipients.4. The self-mockery discoursechanges from surface disharmony to final communication harmony, where the production and interpretation of self-mockery discourse is a synchronousprocess.