Bill Bryson’s Humorous World

The author intends to analyze the appraisal resources in I’m a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America after Twenty Years Away, a collection of humorous travel essays, written by the famous non-fictional bestseller writer Bill Bryson. It is hoped that this study could help readers to appreciate his humorous writing styles, and moreover to get a better and deeper understanding of the humorous mechanism and meanings of appraisal resources in humor discourse.Bill Bryon’s works cover a variety of topics, including travel, historical biography, popular science and language. Characterized by their special humorous styles, most of his works are bestsellers, which, to a certain extend, has become a special cultural phenomenon; however, no research on his works and humorous writing styles exists right now. I’m a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America after Twenty Years Away, one of his books, is a collection of seventy interesting and fascinating essays.As the extension of interpersonal meaning in Systemic Functional Linguistics, and based on lexical analysis, Appraisal Theory is a useful and effective discourse semantic system. It focuses on the appraisal resources in discourse, trying to find out the way people showing their attitudes, evaluations and positions. It is often used to analyze the appraisal resources in media discourse and academic discourse, and classical literature works have.been its favorite in recent years, however, no best-sellers have been analyzed by the theory.Achieved by lots of methods, humor is a special yet complicated communication form. Humor study has long been one of the hot research topics, but most of them are carried out at the sociological, cognitive linguistic, pragmatic and syntactic levels, however, besides the function of releasing pressure and face-saving, humor is an important way to make evaluation. Humor can be employed to express different attitudes, clarify or blur appraisal sources, and adjust the strength of evaluation, which shows that it has powerful evaluation function. Really few researches connecting Appraisal Theory and humor study exists, and taking the humorous travel essays I’m a Stranger Here Myself as the object, the research aims to apply Appraisal Theory to analyze its appraisal resources, their distribution characteristics, and find out their functions in constructing humorous discourse.Based on Appraisal Theory, this thesis has identified, classified and labeled the appraisal resources in the book, and then according to their distribution characteristics, two sample texts are analyzed and discussed in detail. The research questions are listed as follows. Firstly, what are the distribution characteristics of appraisal resources? Secondly, how does the writer use the appraisal resources to evaluate, express attitudes and feelings, and achieve humorous effect? The major findings are:1) In the Attitude System, explicit attitude resources can highlight writers/speakers evaluations and attitudes, and normally, the writer tends to use explicit&positive attitude resources to express affirmative and admiring evaluations and attitudes, and he also likes to use explicit&positive attitude resources for the sake of irony; and the writer prefers the use of explicit&negative attitudes to self-mock, which produces humor and strengthen writer-reader connection; sometimes, in order to be polite and face-saving, the writer uses implicit&negative attitude resources to show negative evaluations and attitudes implicitly, which is kind of irony and humorous; implicit&positive attitude resources are usually used to show positive evaluations or attitudes in an indirectly and implicit way in order to be moderate, however, Bill Bryson seldom uses this kind of attitude resources, which maybe due to his confident and easy-going American character; moreover, a pair of positive attitude and negative attitude strongly compares the difference between behavior and thought, thus producing incongruity and humor;2) In Engagement System, by reducing the room for an alternative voice, dialogical contractions are used to show steadfast positions and clear attitudes, and the writer tends to use several dialogical contractions to reinforce hyperbole and absurdity, thus creating humorous effect; dialogical expansions are used to show that what the writer/speaker states is just one of the possibilities, and that other alternative voices maybe true, so the writer often uses them to blur the evaluation sources, to save face, and at the same time, humorous effect is achieved;3) In Graduation System, the usage of up-scaling and down-scaling forces can raise or lower the tone in order to express different degrees of evaluation; the writer prefers a series of up-scaling forces, especially in rhetorical questions, in order to strengthen evaluations, express strong attitudes and feelings, which consequently produces humor unconsciously; moreover, he likes to use up-scaling and down-scaling forces alternatively, which creates ups-and-downs of readers’expectation, which produces incongruity and achieves humorous effect; sharpening focus often strongly flags a positive attitudinal assessment, while softening focus often flags a negative assessment. Instead of using a single focus, Bill Bryson tends to embed focus in a series of forces to stress or weaken evaluations, attitudes or feelings.