Analysis Of The Laughter-making Mechanism Of Verbal Humor

Humor is a central part of all cultures and languages. Across history, many researchers have studied and analyzed humor from different angles such as philosophy, sociology, psychology, linguistics, art, etc. This makes humor studies a multi-disciplinary field of research from which a great deal of theories have been developed. In which incongruity-based theories of humor seem to be prevalent in contemporary psychological research. While linguists only find out the incongruity existed in verbal humor, they fail to explain how does incongruity bring laughter and trigger humorous effects. This problem is just what this thesis tends to explore.Chapter â…  is an introductory chapter, which gives the definition, classification of humor and puts forward the argument of this thesis. As the complexity of verbal humor, the present study will be conducted from a single point. Therefore, this thesis aims at discuss the incongruity mechanism and defines verbal humor from the perspective of incongruity.Chapter â…¡ is the literature review which reviews the classical humor theories including Superiority Theory, Relief Theory and Incongruity Theory as well as modern linguistic studies of humor.Chapter â…¢ illustrates incongruity as laughter-making mechanism. Firstly, incongruity is further divided into linguistic incongruity and pragmatic incongruity according to where it comes from. Secondly, incongruity is defined as possess the characteristic of highly interpretability and enjoyability. Besides, incongruity within the relevance theory framework is viewed as relevant incongruity. Finally, incongruity occurs in both intended humor and unintended humor. These processes will be adopted in the following discussion.Chapter â…£ and Chapter â…¤ form the body of the thesis which discusses incongruity involved in humor generation from linguistic and pragmatic perspectives respectively. Linguistic incongruity is propelled by phonological, lexical andsyntactical ambiguities. The study of pragmatic incongruity in this thesis only focuses on the violation of the CP and its sub-maxims, that is, the maxim of Quantity, the maxim of Quality, the maxim of Relevance and the maxim of Manner.Chapter VI is conclusion, which summarizes the key ideas discussed in the thesis.