A Study Of Verbal Humor Based On Adaptation-relevance Model

Humor plays a lubricant role in human society,especially in literary works.Mark Twain is a world-famous humorous master.His novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is full of humor and has attracted many scholars' attention at home and abroad.In the meantime they have achieved fruitful results.But previous studies paid more attention to the analysis of the humorous phenomena and there are a few researches about generative mechanism of verbal humor.These researches leave us much room for further research about verbal humor.Therefore,this thesis intends to analyze verbal humor in the novel based on Adaptation-Relevance Model.It tries to reveal the generative mechanism and provide a new perspective for further humor studies.Adaptation-Relevance Model is proposed by domestic scholar Professor Ran Yongping.This new model combines the merits of these two theories.It stresses that the analysis of linguistic phenomena is an integrated process based on cognitive,social,cultural and specific contextual factors.It properly integrates relevance-orientation and relevance presumption of Relevance Theory with dynamic inter-adaptation and strategy-choosing process of Adaptation Theory.Besides,this model stresses linguistic phenomena should be explained from both speaker's and hearer's perspectives.So this model has strong explanatory power in analyzing verbal humor in literary works.This thesis selects original English edition of Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as the research material.The edition published in 2001 by Dover Publications in New York.It has 42 chapters and about 270,000 words.This thesis adopts humorous utterances mainly focus on the former forty chapters and emphatically analyzes the verbal humor in the climax parts of this novel.This thesis adopts case analysis of qualitative method as research methodology,to analyze verbal humor phenomena and to study the generative mechanism of verbal humor by means of data collection and data analysis.The study finds that Adaptation-Relevance Model has a strong explanatory power in analyzing the generative mechanism of verbal humor in literary works.This new model combines relevance-orientation,presumption of relevance and dynamic inter-adaptation together on the basis of contextual dynamics.According to Adaptation-Relevance Model,the representations of verbal humor is mainly manifested by dialects,slangs,caricature,metaphor and paradox.Actually these representations of verbal humor has a close relationship with relevance-orientation,presumption of relevance and dynamic inter-adaptation.Different from previous studies,this thesis applies Adaptation-Relevance Model to the literary discourse in order to explore its explanatory power of verbal humor in specific contexts.The study shows that not only does Adaptation-Relevance Model can reveal the generative mechanism of verbal humor,but the representations of verbal humor in literary works can also extend the application scope of this model.Therefore,it is beneficial for researchers to use this new model to study American language and culture.