A Study On Humor Effect Of Language Variation From A Perspective Of Linguistic Context

Every kind of language has its own rules, and the form deriving from theviolation of these standard rules can be called language variation. On the one hand,language variation is dependent upon its specific context, and it will fade or disappearwhen the context changes. On the other hand, language variation has thecharacteristics of destruction and creativity: it will destroy the systematic constructionof languages, so as to achieve the communicative purpose and pragmatic effect.Humor plays an important part in our daily life. Until now, many linguists havemade a lot of contribution to the field of humor from the perspectives of sociology,psychology, physiology, or even anthropology, while not many of them focus theirattention upon the function of language variation in producing the humor effect fromthe angle of linguistic context. This thesis holds that language variation is one of themost important ways to realize the humor effect of languages, and the production oflanguage variation and humor effect is highly dependent on its specific context.Therefore, this thesis attempts to adopt the theory of linguistic context to explore howthe language variation takes place and leads to the humor effect from the perspectiveof linguistic context.The thesis firstly gives an introduction to the language variation, the operatingmechanisms of humor effect, the context theory and the classifications of linguisticcontext, which lays the theoretical foundation for the following researches. Then, thethesis adopts the qualitative analysis with description as its research method, takes thelanguages in Chinese comic sketches, funny jokes in magazines and humorousconversations in daily life etc. as its data sources, and attempts to explore how thevarious forms of language variation achieve the humor effect under the theoreticalframework of linguistic context. The analysis of these examples shows that the linguistic context in which the language takes place may change continuouslyaccording to different people, different time and different places, and the uncertaintymay make different people have different understanding towards the same languagephenomenon. The different understanding, in fact, is the concrete representative formsof language variation, such as the phonological variation, lexical variation, syntacticvariation, etc. In the meanwhile, language variation can make different people haveunderstanding conflict towards the same language phenomenon, which will lead tounexpected humor effect with the influence of linguistic context when the conflictmeets openly with each other on some occasion.The research shows that language can achieve its humor effect in specificlinguistic context through various forms of language variation, such as phonologicalvariation, lexical variation, syntactic variation, etc, and the production of languagevariation and humor effect is highly dependent upon the linguistic context, therefore,this study has important theoretical significance and practical significance. Because ofthe author’s limited academic horizon, there is great improvement about thecombinative analysis of the linguistic context and the humor effect of languagevariation, and there is a lack of deep exploration about the means and mechanisms ofrealizing the humor effect through language variation. However, it provides a newperspective for the further study on humor effect of language variation.