A Study Of Verbal Humor Based On Systemic-functional Grammar

Humor is the product of human intelligence. It can resolve conflict, ease fear and saverelationship. It has been studied in many fields. There are three classical humor theories:Superior Theory, Relief Theory and Incongruity Theory. Verbal humor as the superior carrier ofhumor has also been studied by linguists from various perspectives like semantic field,pragmatic field, cognitive field and rhetoric field. This study discusses verbal humor realizationfrom the perspective of Systemic-functional Grammar.Systemic-functional Grammar was established to explain how language is used formeaning expression. According to Halliday, language is functional. The form serves themeaning. So he puts forward three meta-functions and based on it formulates an overall systemof language realization. SFG makes great contribution to discourse analysis as it provides thecomplete and rigorous theoretical framework for discourse analysis. So it is available forhumorous discourse analysis and thus verbal humor study.The methods applied in this study are literature review, case study and analysis andintegration. Verbal humor is produced in discourse so humorous discourses can be used as thedata to be analyzed. The data are some humorous discourses collected from the situationcomedy The Big Bang Theory randomly for the sake of diversity. The analysis of data is at twolevels: the lexicon-grammar level and the contextual level.Through the analysis, it is found that inconsistency of register, unconventional use ofcohesion, transitivity and metaphor may lead to humor. However, the humor realization largelydepends on the discourse environment or the situation.Finally the study gives the conclusion of the findings, the limitation and the prospect ofthe study. This study finds out some factors for humor realization. But limited by the samplescale and the single perspective, the study cannot provide the comprehensive explanation ofhumor realization. So more researches of humor should be done with enlarged data collectionand enriched perspectives.