Code-switching In Cognitive Pragmatic Study Of Humor

As a significant research topic of sociolinguistics, code-switching is an interestingand unique linguistic phenomenon in verbal communication, reflecting various andcolorful tastes in social life and culture. It mainly refers to the switching amongdifferent codes in verbal communication. Code is the variety of language, includingdialect, style, genre and so on. The switching may take place in words, sentences oreven the whole paragraph; it not only refers to the switching among different languages,dialects, but also the changing of one casual style into a comparatively formal style.For the recent three decades, code-switching has been broadly discussed inlinguistic filed. Scholars analyze its function, structure and motivation from theperspectives of syntax, discourse analysis, psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics. As adiscourse strategy, code-switching can be employed to manifest one’s social position,exhibit the superiority of a certain language, reorganize the participants of aconversation, adjust interrelationship and speech atmosphere and so on. Creating humoris just one of its communicative effects. However, there is relatively little domesticsystematic research on this issue and achievements are far from abundant. This paper,therefore, taking into full account of the achievements of predecessors, intends tointerpret the humor in code-switching with the help of relevance theory under theframework cognitive linguistics in order to help us have a better understanding ofcode-switching, enrich code-switching related research achievements and promote thedevelopment of humorous utterance research. The code-switching in comedy My OwnSwordsmanship is selected as research materials. It is found that the breaking, activationand updating of relevant expectation scheme give rise humorous effect ofcode-switching. The interpretation of humorous code-switching relies on semanticinference and pragmatic inference as well as context. Informative intention isunderstood through semantic inference and pragmatic inference is to comprehend commutative intention. Besides, context also plays a significant part in the interpretationof humorous code-switching.