An Analysis Of Verbal Humor Generation Under Register Theory

Humor is a pervasive phenomenon in our daily lives.As an essential social skill and a popular form of entertainment,it is easy to perceive but difficult to analyse and create.As a result we often turn to intuition for its comprehension and creation.Therefore,the various aspects of humor are surveyed by numerous scholars from multifarious perspectives such as psychology,philosophy,sociology,rhetoric and linguistic etc.,trying to reveal its nature and secrets.Humor can be further classified into situational humor and verbal humor according different mediums of expression.As verbal humor is abundant in literary and artistic works and extensively applied in various social occasions,the research on its generation is especially practical and valuable.The primary research purpose of this thesis is to investigate into the process of verbal humor generation and thus provide some useful hints for its creation.Verbal humor derives from human cognition and entails language as its medium of expression to achieve certain communicative purposes.This implies that verbal humor generation mechanism should first include two components serving as external stimulus,namely,linguistic methods for its expression and their pragmatic functions and then activate and satisfy the third component playing the role of internal drive,i.e.,the necessary cognitive conditions of humor generation that are composed of incongruity and resolution.Under this notion,the author tries to resolve two primary questions.First,what linguistic methods can trigger incongruity on the level of register?Second,what are the communicative purposes behind these linguistic methods that can provide reasonable explanations for their motivation and thus resolve the incongruity triggered by them?Halliday proposes two linguistic methods for the expression of verbal humor,register borrowing and register misuse,which serve as the starting point of the research in this thesis.Within the framework of register theory,their potential to trigger incongruity is demonstrated through an empirical study by means of taxonomy and comparison.With the aid of speech act theory,their pragmatic functions are investigated and induced through an descriptive study to resolve the incongruity triggered by them.Through the studies above,the following major findings are obtained.First,both register borrowing and register misuse can trigger incongruity on the stratum of register that is recognized by the inconsistent relation between some pair of register variable and its corresponding contextual variable.Second,register borrowing is adopted either to realize certain communicative purposes concerned with "face" or to mislead potential interactants through manipulation of the situational context.As register misuse usually derives from its user's some kind of defect,the narrator of a joke takes this defect as propositional content and performs the primary illocutionary act of expressives to show his contempt or mockery,which brings sense of superiority to the appreciators of the joke and achieves the communicative purpose of solidarity.As these communicative purposes provide sound interpretations to the motivation behind register borrowing and register misuse,the necessary cognitive conditions of humor generation are satisfied and a reasonable verbal humor generation mechanism is naturally brought into being.With register theory as the core theory,combined with speech act theory and incongruity-resolution theory,a reasonable verbal humor generation mechanism is established,which is enlightening for future researchers for its interdisciplinary and systemic approach on humor.