A Study Of Humor Achieved Through Interactions Of Co-speech Gestures And Speech At The Punch Line Moments

The Chinese comic dialogue is a traditional folk art in China,and humor is the lifeline for Chinese comic dialogues.As to humor studies of Chinese comic dialogues,quite a few scholars have conducted research mainly on verbal humor from the perspectives of humor theories,pragmatic theories and cognitive linguistic theories and they have ignored some other non-verbal factors in Chinese comic dialogues.For this reason,we need to start from the perspective of multimodality to provide a fuller exploration of humor in Chinese comic dialogues.In Chinese comic dialogues,except for the speech,the co-speech gesture as a vital visual mode is frequently used by performers,which naturally impels us to consider the role of the co-speech gesture in producing humor.Compared with studies of co-speech gestures abroad,domestic research concerning co-speech gestures is scanty.The co-speech gesture,as a quite important mode,weighs a lot in the process of thinking,for it can serve as a window into the speaker's mind and reflect the way we think or even decide the way we express our thoughts(McNeill,1992).In recent decades,scholars abroad and at home have discussed co-speech gestures in multimodal discourses like speeches,classroom teaching,TV interviews and so on,but few people have ever adopted humor theories to analyze co-speech gestures in Chinese comic dialogues from the perspective of multimodality.Therefore,this thesis,based on the form level in Zhang's(2009)Synthetic Theoretical Framework of Multimodal Discourse Analysis(STF of MDA)and Suls' s(1972)Incongruity-Resolution Theory,investigates how humorous effects are realized through interactions of speech and co-speech gestures at the punch line moments in thirty Chinese comic dialogues from CCTV Spring Festival galas between 2008 and 2018.First,based on the previous classification of jokes(Attardo,1994;Wu & Liu,2009),all the humor points generated by interactions of co-speech gestures and speech are classified into three types of jokes: I-type jokes,IR-type jokes and N-type jokes and co-speech gestures and speech appearing at the punch line moments are exclusively focused on.Next,based on the previous classification on co-speech gestures(McNeill & Levy,1982;McNeill,1992),all co-speech gestures at the punch line moments are divided into beats,deictics,iconics and metaphorics.At last,based on the form level in STF of MDA(Zhang,2009)and Incongruity-Resolution Theory(Suls,1972),this thesis explores the humor-generating mechanism in various types of jokes realized through synergies of co-speech gestures and speech in complementary relation.Through the analysis of humor in Chinese comic dialogues,the major findings of this study are displayed as follows:1.Humor points generated by interactions of co-speech gestures and speech can be classified into three types of jokes: I-type jokes(31.34%),N-type jokes(48.26%)and IR-types jokes(20.40%),among which the N-type jokes takes up the largest portion.The reasons lie in two aspects: from the perspective of performers,it takes less time for them to produce N-type jokes;from the perspective of audiences,the N-type jokes is much easier for them to understand.2.Various types of co-speech gestures participate in the process of humor construction and their ratios in the data are: beats(3.48%),deictics(31.84%),iconics(34.83%),metaphorics(18.91%),prompts(9.45%),deictics and metaphorics(1.00%),deictics and iconics(0.50%).The beats is mainly used by performers to emphasize utterance content;The deictics is to make the target words,concrete or abstract,more explicit;The iconics and the metaphorics are both to describe semantic content: the former is more to present concrete entities while the latter to describe abstract ones which contains the cross-domain mapping process.With the help of metaphorics,abstract concepts are easily understood by audiences.Besides,the prompts is also applied in Chinese comic dialogues to remind people of the shift of topics.The prompts is especially important for the construction of I-type jokes.3.Co-speech gestures at the punch line moments interact with speech mainly in complementary relation-reinforcement relation and non-reinforcement relation to produce humorous effects,which implies that the interactions of both modes,co-speech gestures and speech,are important in constructing humor.The reinforcement relation takes up the largest portion of all the complementary relations.In short,no matter in which type of jokes,a majority of co-speech gestures interact with speech mainly in reinforcement relation to indirectly involve in constructing humor and speech is still the main mode which is reinforced by co-speech gestures.However,a few co-speech gestures cooperate with speech in non-reinforcement to directly participate in humor construction.When people appreciate these jokes,the co-speech gesture plays an indispensable role.4.The Incongruity-Resolution Theory was more applied in the analysis of the inconsistency among texts.According to the data,the non-text mode,co-speech gestures,can also be used to construct incongruity with verbal expressions and they play a vital role in resolving incongruity.Therefore,this theory applies to the analysis of humor in non-text modes.Practically,on the one hand,the results of this research cannot only offer people a better understanding of co-speech gestures in Chinese comic dialogues,but also help them uncover the potential meaning behind these co-speech gestures for the better appreciation of humor.On the other hand,this study expands the research filed for humor.Theoretically,this thesis proves that Incongruity-Resolution Theory can also be applied in multimodal discourses for analyzing non-verbal modes like gestures.