Linguistic And Cultural Differences Reflected In Humor Of English And Chinese

As a means and an end of interpersonal communication, humor is the nuclear part of all cultures, languages, idiolects, and registers of speech. It is a pervasive phenomenon that penetrates every aspect of social life. Strangely enough, study on humor is not reckoned with but even laughed at. Humor is still considered a marginal field of all academic researches. Linguistics, until the recent few decades, had been a negligible player in the study of humor. Encouragingly, the past twenty years had witnessed the first semantic and pragmatic theories on humor. Linguistics is now one of the leading fields in humor research. A lot of linguists such as J. L. Austin, H. P. Grice, Sperber, Wilson, Raskin, etc, have contributed a lot in this field, which leads humor study into a new era.The comparisons of definition and taxonomy of humor in English and Chinese indicate that humor is so complex and multi-disciplined that no definition given can meet everyone's satisfaction, so is the taxonomy of humor. The retrospection of the history and research of humor in English and Chinese reveals that theories on humor in China and English speaking countries are different in forms or methods. Theories on English humor are plentiful and specific. It seems that English has stepped deep into every aspect of humor. Compared with English, theories of Chinese humor are quite smaller in quantity. Study on humor in China is young, because in the past, Chinese gave priority to the development of humor itself.According to Palmer (1994), incongruity is a key element in the production and perception of humor. Only when there is an incongruity between a concept and the real object can a humor be possible. And only when the incongruity is revealed and sensed will there be laughter. Through the analysis of some common types of humor and with the help of Austin's Speech Act Theory, Grice's Cooperative Principle, especially Sperber and Wilson's Relevance Theory (RT), the author intends to explicate the nature and mechanism of verbal humor. However, this is not the focus of this thesis, because numerous studies and researches had been done on these two aspects.In this thesis, the author exploits the comparative and contrastive approaches primarily to show that on occasions, the same comic situation is not regarded as funny or laughable by communicators from another culture. What's the reason? Because "one had to understand why they said what they said and how they said it to whom in a specific context of situation. In addition, one had to link their words, beliefs and mindsets to a larger context culture." (Kramsch, 1989:26). So the thesis goes further to make a tentative exploration on the linguistic and cultural reasons that lead to barriers in the understanding of humor in English from the analysis of the differences between English and Chinese, Western culture and Chinese culture.To a larger degree, only when the recipient understands its cultural connotation enough, can humorous utterance itself be much more meaningful, so is language itself. Therefore, acculturation is tightly linked to second language acquisition (SLA). The pedagogical implication of this study lies not only in the importance of culture learning in SLA, but in the attempt to provoke people's concern for that courses in culture should be given at the early stage of SLA and the cultivation of cultural awareness should be integrated with the whole process of foreign language teaching. According to Brown (1980), young children are socio-culturally resilient. They are less culture-bound than adults. In other words, SLA is related to the stages of acculturation. Yet, in China, only college students majoring in foreign language have courses in culture. It's far too late.