【作者】 彭娟；

【导师】 王崇义；

【作者基本信息】 湖南师范大学 ， 外国语言学及应用语言学， 2005， 硕士

【摘要】 幽默几乎无处不在,学者们对幽默现象的研究见诸于多门学科。目前这些研究已经从生理学,修辞学,哲学等传统领域扩展到了人类学,教育学,美学,社会学等更加广阔的领域和新兴学科中。 幽默是一个有着多种意义的概念。对幽默的定义,学者们莫衷一是。有人说是一种品质、精神和生活态度;有人认为是一种性格、艺术风格和审美形式;还有人认为幽默是一种语调、思维观等等。综合这些认识,我们可以对它进行一个基本的界定:幽默不是存在于客观世界而是存在于人的意识里,它是通过幽默的接受者和有可能产生幽默的事物的互动来实现的,即幽默是一个认知过程。 对幽默的分类有多种方法。一般来说幽默可以分为两大类:依赖于人们肢体行为和表情行为的情景幽默及以言语行为为主要产生方式的言语幽默。在本论文的研究中我们将重点研究言语幽默。 国外不少学者对幽默的内在机制进行了卓有成效的研究。Plato强调优越感能产生幽默;Freud提出了松弛论;Kant认为乖讹是一切幽默制笑的基础。对于言语幽默的语言学研究也很广泛。国外一些学者研究了言语幽默的策略(Zajdman,1995);言语幽默行为的参与角色(Norrick,1993);及言语幽默所反映的社会特性(Boxer,1997)等。国内也有不少人对言语幽默进行了探讨。有的学者从语义学的角度探讨了言语幽默产生的原因(南佐民,2000;吕光旦,1984);有的学者从修辞角度阐述了言语幽默的产生(王金玲,2002);还有的学者以语篇的理论为指导,探讨了言语幽默的理解过程(徐立新,2002)。但从整体上来看,这些研究尚未注重和揭示言语幽默的制笑机制。因此探讨和分析言语幽默的制笑机制是本研究的目的。本文从静态和动态两个方面研究了言语幽默的制笑机制。 我们通过研究发现偏离是言语幽默制笑的根本原因,虽然偏离本身并不能制笑。因为要想获得幽默,还必须有取乐的心态(playfulness)。幽默发出者以语言的(或非语言的)手段向听众或观众暗示幽默的发生,而幽默的接受者又根据这些线索以一种取乐的心更多还原

【Abstract】 Humor can be said to be omnipresent. It has been extensively studied in the fields of philosophy, rhetoric, psychology, anthropology, aesthetic and sociology etc.Humor is a meaningful concept. The definitions of humor are somewhat controversial. Some people think it is a temperament, a spirit and an attitude to life; some think it is a personality, an artistic style and an aesthetic form; others think it is a tone, a mind style etc. In this thesis, humor is defined as a cognitive process, which is realized through interaction between its receiver and humorous things, and it is something in our mind and not in the real world.Humor can be classified into two categories: situational humor and verbal humor. In this thesis, our efforts are chiefly made to deal with verbal humor.Scholars abroad have achieved fruitful research results of the mechanism of humor. Plato emphasizes that superiority can cause laughter, Freud regards laughter as an expression of relief, Kant holds that laughter arises from incongruity etc. In the field of linguistics, some explorations have been made in regard to its social aspects, such as strategies of verbal humor (Zajdman, 1995), participants of verbal humor (Norrick, 1993) and social characteristics of verbal humor (Boxer, 1997) etc. In China, it is true that some scholars have done certain researches on verbal humor, but their studies are largely centered on the functions, features, and techniques of humor; little attention has been paid to how verbal humor works to elicit laughter. So this thesis aims at exploring and analyzing the laughter-eliciting mechanism of verbal humor.We find that deviation is the basic cause of verbal humor. Though deviation alone cannot elicit laughter, deviations, when accompanied by a playful attitude, could actively produce amusing effects of verbal humor.That is the laughter-eliciting mechanism of verbal humor.Based on this analysis, we begin to investigate it from the perspectives of linguistic form, pragmatics, logical and value system. From the angle of linguistic form, sound-oriented, lexis-oriented, syntactic-oriented deviations may make language in use humorous. Moreover, verbal humor, as a kind of speech communication, which depends on a particular context and implicature, cannot be understood without pragmatic consideration. We find that pragmatic theories offer us a reasonable theoretical framework in analyzing and understanding the laughter-eliciting mechanism of verbal humor. Our examinations reveal that verbal humor could be elicited by deviating from the maxims of Cooperative Principle and also demonstrate that Relevance Theory could help account for the production and appreciation of verbal humor. According to Relevance Theory, every aspect of communication is governed by relevance principle. However, in verbal humor, in order to achieve the intended humorous effects, the speaker is not always expected to give the most relevant possible information; as a result, the context envisaged by the speaker and the one actually used by the hearer do not agree with each other. A search for a more relevant interpretation worth being processed may be activated on the part of hearer, despite the supplementary processing effort. In the comprehension of verbal humor, the extra processing efforts invested are to be offset by additional humorous effects, by which the hearer will be amused. So the understanding process of verbal humor is actually a cognitive process of interpreting the pragmatic meaning of an utterance deviating from its literal meaning. Our further exploration discovers that people’s logical and value deviation can generate the humorous effects.This thesis begins with an introduction of humor, its definitions, classification and a review of various theories on humor in different fields of study. Then playful deviation as the laughter-eliciting mechanism of更多还原