Research on Humorous Discourse

Author: Xu Lixin
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2003-12-01
Features: Humor is a unique quality, ability, and mode of communication for humans, while language is a special tool for human ability and communication. The conveyance and creation of humor are often accomplished through language. Therefore, studying linguistic humor can better understand the phenomenon of humor. This research also helps humans understand themselves. In fact, within the postmodern culture we inhabit, it is difficult to find situations where language is used without humor (Thornborrow et al., 2000: 179). Since discourse is the organizational method humans use when communicating in language, humorous discourse naturally becomes the object of study in this book. Many disciplines have studied the phenomenon of humor from different perspectives, from philosophy, aesthetics, anthropology, sociology, psychology, to film and literary criticism, each working independently with little absorption of research findings from other fields. Recently, the study of humorous phenomena has gradually attracted attention from linguistics. People are increasingly recognizing the interdependent relationship between language and humor. However, scholars often find it challenging to study humor from the perspective of language or discourse. This is because: first, the linguistic means employed in humor involve all levels of language and are difficult to categorize; second, to unveil the mystery of humor, linguistic theory alone is far from sufficient, and theories from sociology, psychology, aesthetics, and many other fields need to work together. Previous studies of humor in linguistics generally focus on rhetorical devices, schema theory, cooperative principles, and relevance theory. However, none of these seem to fully reveal the linguistic principles of humor. This book references research methods and theories from various disciplines, focusing on the study of humorous discourse from Halliday's three semantic metafunctions of systemic functional linguistics (ideational, interpersonal, and textual), while incorporating cultural, contextual, and psychological levels into the overall model of the production and appreciation of verbal humor.