An Analysis Of Reverse Jokes

With the diversified development of linguistics, discourse analysis is in the ascendant, but it has been rare to analyse jokes as a kind of texts. In the past, studies of jokes are mostly from the perspective of ambiguity, conversational implicature and so on. This paper takes a special kind of jokes, which can be read from front to back, and also from back to front (they are called "reverse jokes" in this article) as the research object, and analyses the texts in details.Affected by the sequence of texts, most of texts can only be read from front to back, but "reverse jokes" can be read both from front to back and also from back to front, and only combining the two kinds of readings can reflect its humor. This particularity of "reverse jokes" is closely related with its unique cohesion and the ways of meaning combination. In order to explain the reasons of "reverse jokes" generating, this paper applies Halliday’s theory of textual cohesion and coherence, combines with some pragmatic theories, and analyses the forms, meanings and pragmatic features of "reverse jokes".The paper is divided into five chapters. The first chapter is an introduction. It has a brief review of Halliday’s theory of textual cohesion and coherence; clears the theoretical basis of this paper, and briefly introduces the study’s purpose, significance, train of thought and methods. The second chapter is the cohesion of "reverse jokes".It totally analyses the cohesion which "reverse jokes" are adopted and its positive effect for "reverse jokes" generating. The third chapter is the meaning structure of "reverse jokes". It analyses the ways of meaning combination of "reverse jokes" and the reason of opposite meaning when you read from front to back and from back to front. The fourth chapter is pragmatic features of "reverse joke".It shows the pragmatic features of "reverse jokes" from the aspects of speech act, cooperative principle, etc, and reveals the human factors of "reverse jokes" generating. The fifth chapter is the conclusion. It is a comprehensive summary of this paper. The appendix is "reverse jokes" which we can collect.By means of the detailed analysis of "reverse jokes", the paper reveals the reasons of "reverse jokes" generating and characteristics of their forms and meaning, which provide a new perspective for jokes’ research and an object lesson for jokes’ creation. At the same time, the analysis of "reverse jokes" shows that forms and meaning can not be separated from the perspective of practice, and also proves the feasibility of the theory of Functional Discourse Analysis.