Experience Construal Of Verbal Humor In Mark Twain's Short Stories

The argument on meaning has never been on a downfall in linguistics or philosophy.There are mainly two traditions when meaning is put into discussion---the logico-philosophical one and the rhetorical-ethnographic one,the latter of which has become the essence and tradition in systemic functional linguistics.Language has been evolving both in construing experience and enacting social processes,and the experience construal aspect is a growing body of work in SFL.Halliday and Matthiessen(1999)are concerned with how humans construe experience.Experience here is deemed as a resource,a potential as well as meaning,and language plays a major part in storing,exchanging and construing experience.Experience can be transformed into meaning through language and constructed by language with the lexicogrammar as the driving force.Samuel Langhorne Clemens,better known by his pen name Mark Twain,has painted himself as the “greatest American humorist”.Many scholars(Liu Yuhao,2015;Wang Nuan,2009;Wei Pengcheng,2009;Xu Jiaqiang,2010)have carried out studies on Mark Twain in various respects.Except that Twain's long stories have been hailed as his major fruition,he also leaves marks in the history of literary as a master of the verbal humor in his short stories.Taking three representative short stories as the language materials,the experience construal phenomena of verbal humor by means of the ideation base theory proposed by Halliday and Matthiessen(1999)will be analyzed in this thesis.The researches and discussions in this thesis will be focused on the research questions as follows:(1)How do different dimensions in ideation base co-work to construe experience of verbal humor in Mark Twain' s short stories?(2)How does grammatical metaphor work as a growing body of the ideation base when experience is construed through Mark Twain' s verbal humor?(3)How is the experience construal model of verbal humor constructed in Mark Twain's short stories?A combination of multiple research methods is adopted in this thesis to initiate a comprehensive study of experience construal of verbal humor in Mark Twain's short stories.The documentary method and analysis method are adopted to read and research previous studies on Mark Twain's verbal humor and experience construal and to analyze the construal of experience of verbal humor with three short stories of Mark Twain's,revealing the relationships between experience,language and meaning of verbal humor and the way different dimensions co-work to construe experience.After the statistical analysis of the elements,figures and sequences in the ideation base as well as grammatical metaphors is made,the induction method is employed to construct a model for the construal of experience in verbal humor.There are in total five chapters that make up this thesis.Chapter One makes an introduction to the research background,aims and significance of the study,together with the organization of the study.The theoretical foundation will be respectively presented into three parts in Chapter Two.Concepts concerning experience construal will be briefed in the first part,including the development of experiential view on language,the nature and dimension of the ideation base,phenomena of experience and previous studies of experience construal at home and abroad.The second part reviews studies on Mark Twain's verbal humor,including an overview of Mark Twain and his works,studies on verbal humor at home and abroad,and previous studies on Mark Twain's verbal humor.Chapter Three examines research questions,data collections as well as research methodology and procedures.Chapter Four makes an analysis of experience construal of verbal humor in Mark Twain's short stories,namely experience construal of verbal humor on element,figure,sequence and grammatical metaphor(ideational grammatical metaphor and interpersonal grammatical metaphor)level,which finally contributes to establishing the model for experience construal of verbal humor in this thesis.Conclusions will be drawn in Chapter Five,including major findings andimplications of the current study.Besides,limitations of the current study and suggestions for further study will also be pointed out.Through the analysis,it can be found out that experience,language and meaning co-work as a whole and each of them cannot separate from the other two.Experience can be treated as meaning and as something that is construed in language.Apart from that,different dimensions in ideation base co-work to construe experience of verbal humor in Mark Twain's short stories.Grammatical metaphors help to expand the ideation base in a higher stratification other than the content plane when experience is construed through verbal humor.In short,elements,figures,sequences along with grammatical metaphors work together to set up the experience construal model of verbal humor.