Analysis Of Penggen's Rolesin Comic Dialogues From The Perspective Of Rhetorical Structure Theory

Xiangsheng is a popular traditional Chinese performing art.A comic dialogue,as a representative of xiangsheng,involves two performers,namely dougen and penggen who differ in the distribution of labor,that is,daugen is the main narrator,while penggen assists douggen in narrating.Penggen is often neglected by the audience because of the unequal distribution of labor.Although comic dialogue performers and commentators(e g.Geng&Ji,1992;Xiao,2001)have made some systemic study on penggen' sroles in helping dougen deliver humor to the audience,the research onpenggenhas not caught the attention of linguists,who have focused their attention on the mechanism of humor generation through the analysis of excerpts from comic dialogues.To fill this gap,the present study adopts Rhetorical Structure Theory(Mann&Thompson,1987)as the theoretical framework for data analysis.The data in the research are ten comic dialogues taken from The Collection of GuoDegang 's Comic Dialogues(????????????)released by BeijingKehai Electronic Press in 2006.Through data analysis,the study found that the most frequently used relations were Evaluation,Solutionhood,Backchannel,Restatement,Interpretation and Interruption;Backchannel and Interruption are two relations borrowed from Yngve(1970)and Daradoumis(1996)respectively in order to account for the present data.Depending on what relation was employed,penggen's roles in comic dialogues were shown in four aspects:(1)a representative of the audience,who indicatesto dougen that the listeners(penggen and the audience)have received the information dougen attempts to convey and encouragesdougen to continue.According to the General Theory of Verbal Humor(Attardo&Raskin,1991),humor rises from script opposition-the incongruity between two opposite scripts.In comic dialogues,there are three stages in delivering humor to the audience the activation of the first scripts,the activation of the second scripts and the highlighting of script oppositions.Penggen plays a role in all these three stages:(2)the audience's helper in getting the important information to understand the first scripts;(3)an elicitor of humor,whopaves the way fordougen's delivering of punch lines which activate the second scripts;(4)a highlighter of humor,who attracts the audience's attention to script oppositions which generate humor.The implications of the research are(1)besides the 24 relations proposed by Mann and Thompson(1987),two more relations-Backchannel and Interruption-are needed to describe the relations between dougen's and penggen's utterances;(2)a new area in comic dialogue studies-penggen's roles in humor construction-is offered.As a probe into penggen' sroles in comic dialogues,the present thesis is certainly not devoid of limitations:the ten dialogues analyzed in the present research all have GuoDegang as dougen,which might undermine the findings since douggen and penggen are mutually influenced.For future studies,the same research can be replicated with comic dialogues which have different performers as dougen.