A Study Of Gender Difference In Humorous Discourse Based On Dialogic Syntax

Humor has a quite long history of research such that its research origin can be traced back to Plato and Aristotle in ancient Geek.While,the exploration of gender difference in humorous discourse is a new research topic.This study investigates the humorous conversations between men and women in daily life based on the theory of Dialogic Syntax which is put forward by Du Bois so as to uncover the gender difference in humorous discourse and the reason for it.Moreover,this research provides the referential significance for related studies and teaching.The theory of Dialogic Syntax,proposed by Du Bois(2014),primarily investigates the dialogic resonance activated by the parallelism and mapping relation between utterances in daily oral communication.As to resonance,it means that the recipient selectively reuses some linguistic resources of the former speaker in the new utterance,and there occurs a mapping relation between the new utterance and the proceeding utterance in pattern or content.Therefore,the effect of humor can be created in some situations.Based on the relevance between the new utterance and proceeding utterance,dialogic resonance can be categorized into three types,namely,total resonance,partial resonance and zero resonance.This thesis takes Dialogic Syntax as theoretical basis and uses the sitcom How I Met Your Mother as linguistic data,endeavoring to answer three questions: 1)How is the effect of humor produced in oral communication through dialogic resonance in How I Met Your Mother? 2)Which features are represented by men and women,separately,in their utterances when they use each type of resonance in order to create a humorous effect? 3)Is the gender difference in the choice of each type of dialogic resonance to create sense of humor in oral communication statistically different? If yes,what reasons lead to the gender difference in the choice of different types of resonance?In this research,there are 520 humorous dialogues altogether searched by the author in the sitcom How I Met Your Mother from season 1 to season 5(the playback time of the five seasons is nearly 50 hours and the scripts of them are 307,162 words).The author builds a small-scale corpus and adopts the quantitative methodology and qualitive methodology to study the data collected in this thesis.The findings of this research are concluded as follows: 1)The utterance achieves a humorous effect through a special cognitive mechanism of humor based on dialogic resonance;2)The percentage of three types of resonance used by men in their utterances are 17.25%,47.71% and 35.04%.The percentage of three types of resonance used by women in their utterances are 21.38%,33.96% and 44.65%;3)The author uses Chi-Square Test by SPSS 24.0 to examine that there do exist a statistical difference between male and female in the choice of different categories of resonance(P<0.05).Sociolinguistic and cognitive linguistic reasons which are distinctive characteristics of language in use and different social background between men and women,the degree of relevance of utterances and various resources of resonance,cause the gender difference in the choice of different categories of resonance between male and female to produce sense of humor.This thesis not only provides a new research outlook for the study of humor and gender difference,but also examines and enriches the rationality and practical significance of the theory of Dialogic Syntax.