A Study On Appraisal Resources And Verbal Humor In Zhao Benshan’s Sketches From The Perspective Of Appraisal Theory

Sketch is an indispensable language program on the stage of CCTV Spring Festival Gala.Zhao Benshan is one of the famous sketch performers and sketches performed by him have been voted the audience’ favorite program of CCTV Spring Festival Gala for 15 consecutive years,which have become the representatives of Chinese comic sketches.So far,linguistic researches on Zhao Benshan’s sketches mainly interpret the verbal humor in Zhao Benshan’s sketches from the perspectives of Pragmatics and Cognitive Linguistics.Based on previous researches,this thesis attempts to apply Appraisal Theory to explore Appraisal resources used in Zhao’s sketches and the roles played by Appraisal resources in realizing the humorous effects of the sketches.This thesis takes the 21 sketches performed by Zhao Benshan on the stage of CCTV Spring Festival Gala as the research material.Firstly,the sketches were annotated manually with the help of UAM Corpus Tool,and the frequencies and proportions of Attitude,Engagement and Graduation resources were output by this software.Then,all the humorous utterances related with Appraisal resources in Zhao Benshan’s sketches were collected and analyzed to reveal the roles played by Attitude,Engagement and Graduation resources in creating humorous effects.The major findings are concluded as follows.(1)A large number of Appraisal resources are employed in Zhao Benshan’s sketches.As for Attitude,negative Attitude resources and Judgement resources are used more often;As for Engagement,Heterogloss takes a large proportion,and Dialogic Contract is used more often than Dialogic Expansion;As for Graduation,Up-scaling Graduation and Force resources are preferred by characters.(2)The employment of the three different kinds of resources is helpful in generating humor,and the proportion of humor produced by Graduation is the largest.(3)As for Attitude,characters employ positive Attitude resources to give themselves positive evaluations in an exaggerated way,through which negative images are shaped;Negative Affect resources are often used to give negative assessments to characters’ appearance,capacity,etc.,so as to form a humorous effect and make the audience laugh.(4)By Monogloss,the unexpected and ridiculous assertions of characters are expressed.Under Heterogloss,Dialogic Contractive resources are employed to expose others’ shortcomings in public and make others become speechless and feel embarrassed by limiting dialogic space;Dialogic Expansion allows for other voices,and characters detach themselves from the responsibilities for negative viewpoints or stances by attributing these utterances to others,through which humorous effects are achieved.(5)As for Graduation,shortcomings and frailties of human nature are revealed by up-scaling Force resources or cooperation between up-scaling and down-scaling Force resources;Focus resources are used to sharpen or blur the boundaries of semantic categories in the utterances of characters,through which funny sides of different characters are revealed and humorous effects are achieved.(6)One category of Appraisal resource in cooperation with other categories of Appraisal resources,metaphor,simile or transposition of homophones could also achieve humorous effects.