Study On Language Deviation Of Humorous Expressions In Qi Zhi&Da Bing’s Crosstalks

As a kind of traditional performing arts, crosstalk exerts its humorous, bitter, and sarcasm methods to achieve the purpose of entertaining people. Speaking of crosstalk, the majority of crosstalk thesis are just the research of north crosstalk. There is no doubt that their crosstalks are often mixed with northern dialects. As the only typical southern crosstalk performers,"Qi zhi&Da bing" is a household name in Hunan. The author thinks that in terms of northern dialect and southern dialect, their language is an important factor to constitute the artistic charm of crosstalk. So far, the crosstalk research is mainly relative to more traditional research at home and abroad, such as comic language features,"package" constitution means, and comic language rhetoric features. There are also some studies which adopt the western theories as their entry point, such as presupposition theory, cooperative principle and conversational implicature theory. But there are rarely scholars who specifically study the crosstalk from the angle of language deviation.Based on Geoffrey N.leech’s classification of deviation, the study has made a tentative effort to investigate the verbal humor in Qi zhi&Da bing’s crosstalk from the phonological deviation, lexical deviation, grammatical deviation, semantic deviation, and register deviation. Besides, this study tries to expound and prove how the language deviation produces humorous effect. Considering the features of verbal communication of this artistic perform, Qi zhi&Da bing’s crosstalk widely use phonological deviation, such as rhyme, homophone, mispronunciation, pause improperly, dialect accent, creating a large number of easy jokes to improve the humorous effect. What’s more, connecting with Wang Xijie’s "zero degree deviation" theory, this thesis further analyzes the generative mechanism of deviation in humorous language. The study found that the formation of language deviation consists of external mechanism and internal mechanism. Viewed from language itself, the formation mechanism of linguistic deviations in their crosstalk is the routine correspondence of the signifier and the signified. From the point of external factors of the language, humorous language deviation is mainly related to the specific context.Finally, the thesis illustrates motivations for deviation in Qi zhi&Da bing’s crosstalks and reaches its conclusion: Crosstalk is different from the general daily communication activities, it is a kind of art form of communication. The reason why it can make the audience laugh and achieve the desired effect result from the application of language deviation. Generally speaking, actors of crosstalk use lexis or sentences which break the linguistic rules so as to create a special atmosphere to achieve humorous effect. Influenced by the pre-existing thinking pattern, audiences always attempt to comprehend the linguistic expressions according to their normal meaning. However, in certain context, audiences will realize immediately that it makes no sense with the normal meaning. Thus leads to the deviation between their expectation and the true intention of the performer, and the more intense the conflict of message, the more obvious comic effect, which is the very nature of humor.By analyzing deviation of humorous language expressions in Qi zhi&Da bing’s crosstalk, this thesis aims to prove the applicability of the deviation theory, enrich the research of cross language, hoping it can promote the further linguistic study of crosstalk and talk show.