Ambiguity As A Source Of Humor

The research of humor has a long-dated history, which has attracted much academic interest in the field of linguistics, literature, sociology, psychology, and culture studies. This dissertation does a research following the linguistic tradition of humor representation and attempts to discover the leading factors to humor and its working mechanisms. Generally speaking, it is called'sources of humor'in the dissertation.The most recent linguistic studies of verbal humor are represented by Raskin's (1985) Semantic Script Theory of Humor (SSTH) and Attardo & Raskin's (1991) General Theory of Verbal Humor (GTVH). Drawing on the notion of script, SSTH develops on the incongruity-resolution theory by identifying the mechanisms of script opposition (SO) to account for the necessary and sufficient conditions for a text to be humorous. It is also a systematic application of semantic theory to the study of humor. As a revised version of SSTH, GTVH extends the research purview to the general body of verbal humor by proposing a hierarchy of six Knowledge Resources, among which SO is mentioned once more. Therefore, the importance of SO is obvious to be seen. However, SO cannot adequately address the issue of humor interpretation, which is a challenge that is taken by this dissertation. Specifically speaking, the focus of this dissertation is put on the complement to SO. There are mainly two points. Firstly, SO once put that'the text is compatible, fully or in part, with two different scripts and the scripts with which the text is compatible are opposite…'(Raskin, 1985:99). However, in reality, the situation is various. Not all humors are following the two-script analysis. There might be more than two main scripts at one time. At the same time, scripts can contain other scripts. The internal-scripts structure is complicated. It is not fixed. The relationship between the scripts could be parallel to each other, one imbedded in another and etc.. Secondly, ambiguity is the source of humor. In other words, SO might not be the necessary or sufficient elements to arouse humor. Ambiguity, to some extent, includes opposition. In fact, opposition is a specialization of ambiguity and they differ in degree. Usually script ambiguity instead of script opposition is the reason leading to humor. The dissertation uses some selected examples to illustrate how ambiguity plays an important role as a source of humor. Generally speaking, the instantiation is done in three categories, which are lexical ambiguity, structural ambiguity and vocal ambiguity. These factors are considered and added to SSTH's two-scripts-in-opposition formula. It is believed that SSTH/GTVH may be valid not in capturing a set of necessary and sufficient conditions of verbal humor, but in describing a prototype.Furthermore, some basic information about humor, such as the definition, the transformational process, the theoretical bases and other sources of humor, are also presented in the dissertation. All in all, this dissertation makes an effort to make some hypotheses to SO and overcome some of the inadequacies in the traditional systems. e.g., script and script opposition, the interpreting mechanism of humor, etc.. The work in this dissertation attempts to make some contribution in humor understanding, and paves the way for more systematic endeavors.