| As one of the most precious quality and cultural treasures of human, humor isinvested with great significance. Among its various expressive forms, verbal humor isthe most popular and accessible one. Due to its pervasiveness and importance, it is anintriguing topic for a wide range of disciplines including sociology, anthropology,philosophy, aesthetics, psychology, literary criticism, etc.In linguistic domain, abundant accounts have been made from differentperspectives. And the field of cognitive-linguistic and pragmatics witnesses the mostproductive ones of which the current study give close examinations. However, thestudy of verbal humor is so complex and difficult that there is still much room fordeeper and wider researches. For one thing, most of the developed theoreticalconstructions, which are built for the verbal humor’s operation, possess sole focus onone side of a verbal humor activity, i.e. the generation or inference of it. For another,centering on the main productive mechanism of verbal humor: incongruity, oldliterature uphold their point of view on the basis of it with few efforts devoted toexplain generative and interpretive way of such incongruity. Therefore, this thesisaims at advancing a "Generation-Inference Model"(GIM) for verbal humor andfinding another renewed resolution to figure out the generative and inferential route ofincongruity of verbal humor.This thesis gains enlightenment from "The Relevance-Adaptation Model"(YangPing,2001). In the view of speaker, Yang Ping sets up "The Relevance-AdaptationModel" to account for the mechanism of discourse production, which is relevance andadaptation. In the productive history of an utterance, not only the principle ofrelevance but also the mechanism of adaptation helps the speaker form the ostensiveact. Moreover, by close examination and analysis of the Relevance Theory and TheTheory of Adaptation, we find that the two theories can be applied to discourseinterpretation as well. From the perspective of discourse generation, the form of adiscourse is decided by speaker’s relevant assumption which results from a dynamic adaptation between contextual elements and language structure. By the same token,from the perspective of discourse inference, hearers are able to grasp the meaning ofthe speaker after the contextual adaptation and relevance-seeking. Strategy selection isinvolved in both of the above processes. Thus, the generative and inferential processof discourse can be linked by the mechanism of relevance and adaptation.Through the analysis of previous literature, incongruity is the main mechanismengendering humor. The process of making a VH involves the incongruity thatproducers make and the resolution to it receivers provide based on the relevanceseeking and contextual adaptation. After the exploration of components and deepmechanism of VH, a unified model for the generation and inference of VH isestablished. It is used to provide unified explanation for two different cognitive verbalprocesses in which the productive and inferential route of incongruity is exposed aswell. This route stems from the conflicts between the prototypical contextualassumptions (PCA) of VH creator and the peripheral contextual assumptions (P’CA)of VH receiver. The difference between PCA and P’CA creates incongruity so as toproduce comic effects in a piece of verbal humor. Under the trigger of set-up,producers and receivers seek own PCA immediately. Meanwhile, producers need tofind P’CA which is deviated from PCA to create incongruity to pave the way forhumorous effects. The contextual information of P’CA adapts with language structureto release punch line, upon the hearing of which, receiver’s PCA immediately iseliminated and consequently the laughter is generated.Adopting quantitative and qualitative approaches, this thesis established acorpus of12episodes of The Big Bang Theory first season. We categorize the selectedVH into four kinds to analyze them in a scientific and neat way for finding theultimate cause of the generation of laughter. |
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