Conversational Humor Discourse Analysis

This paper separates conversational humor from verbal humor as specific researchobject. We collect and select two hundred conversational humors from some medium suchas modern movies, talk shows and the internet as effective corpus. This study, on the basisof previous studies, is conducted in the discourse analysis framework in order to do somecomprehensive researches on the structure, cohesive device and discourse function ofconversational humor. Firstly, the conversational analysis theory is used to study theconversational structure of the conversational humor. Based on the producing, developingand finishing process of the conversational humor, the paper divides the conversationalhumor into three parts--the forward linkage statement, the humorous statement and thebackward linkage statement, and analyzes the relevance among the three parts. Asconversational humor is a special verbal behavior, the paper probes deeply into thedifferences of the adjacency pairs between conversational humo r and generalizedconversation and summarizes the feature of the adjacency pairs of the conversationalhumor. Secondly, we take the theory of the discourse cohesion and coherence as theoreticalbasis to compare and analyze the differences of the form and function of some cohesivedevices between conversational humor and generalized conversation. On that basis, wesummarize the cohesion features of conversational humor. Thirdly, from the aspects ofaudience psychology, speaker’s intention and the conversational humor itself, the papersummarizes the pragmatic functions of the conversational humor, which includes thefunction of humorous, the function of maintaining face, vent function, ironic andeducational function.These studies throw light on the study of conversational humor, to some extent makeup for a deficiency of the former studies and help us understand the essence of theconversational humor from the aspects of both form and function. However, the paper stillhas some deficiencies such as the collection of corpus and the definition of conversationalhumor and so on, which requires deeper study.