An Integrative Perspective Of Mark Twain’s Verbal Humor

Humor is a universal phenomenon in human communication that attracts attention from scholars of various fields all over the world. From the perspective of pragmatics, verbal humor is considered as being in violation of Cooperative Principle(CP). Raskin(1985) holds that humor belongs to the so-called bona-fide communication which is a mode of communication as proved in making jokes, shaming, or lying. On the other hand, verbal humor is also a speech act which is studied from the aspects of the Politeness Principle and Face Saving Theory as means of a face saving act or face threatening act. With regard to the humorous communication, relevance theory plays a significant role in humor interpretation, though it puts much more emphasis on the hearer’s side. Furthermore, as a kind of literary expression, humor enjoys wide popularity among the scholars of literature, whose attention is drawn to such aspects as the features of humor, humor of American style, humor skills and so on.This thesis attempts to discuss the verbal humor from some of Mark Twain’s works by adopting an integrative perspective formed through integrating mental space theory and adaptation theory. It first proves that the two theories are theoretically combinable, and then it reveals that the integrative approach is practically preferable. Both the theoretical combination and the practical preference are then testified against Mark Twain’s verbal humor with relation to both its production and its interpretation.There are many theories of verbal humor, including three conventional theories of verbal humor and three modern linguistic theories of verbal humor. For all the diversity, there exist common grounds among the theories of verbal humor. Since script opposition is advocated in both semantic script theory of humor and general theories of verbal humor, the most significant common ground of the theories of verbal humor is the two opposite scripts or two opposite elements. On the other hand, we treat “script” as being conceptually equivalent to the notion of “mental space” in the mental space theory, and we assume that the production of humor is based on the juxtaposition of the two conflicting mental spaces, and that the simultaneous adaptation to the two opposing mental spaces is the key to the interpretation of verbal humor.The integrative perspective analyzes verbal humor in a more comprehensive and dynamic way. Along this approach, we not only illustrate the reason why the utterance or the text is humorous, but also take the issue of verbal humor interpretation or humor processing into account, so it is also more reader-oriented. The application of the integrative perspective to the verbal humor of Mark Twain’s literary works in turn validates the viability of the integrative perspective.Finally, the thesis concludes that the combination of mental space theory and adaptation theory displays more explanatory power than other verbal humor analyses. Verbal humor is produced and interpreted only when the interlocutors make simultaneous adaptation to the discrepant spaces.