从模糊语言的角度看言语幽默的产生.doc

从模糊语言的角度看言语幽默的产生 Viewing the Production of Verbal Humor from Vague Language Abstract In 1965 with the appearance of fuzzy sets theory posed by L A Zadeh an American scientist the research of the vague language began to penetrate into various fields In 1975 it was Professor Wu Tieping who first introduced fuzzy theory into China and because of his contribution Chinese people s knowledge of vague language is deepened greatly Until now people paid a lot of attention to the theoretical discussion on vague language made great efforts on its semantic meaning but they overlooked the important roles it could play in the field of pragmatics and other relevant languages There is no doubt that the vague theory has developed a new area and provided new perspective for the study of the other aspects of linguistics Verbal humor is just one of the new branches As the inherent property it is impossible to avoid that vagueness may have strong impact on people s understanding and use of the verbal humor in the daily life It must play a positive part in communication The paper from the angle of vague theory using others study for reference and applying the vagueness of phonetic lexical syntactic and discourse mainly discusses the production of humor language from vague language in communication Based on these vague devices there are a lot of detailed discussion and analysis of the major forms of verbal humor to deepen people s understanding the production of verbal humor from vague language by making use of a great deal of powerful examples Key Words vague language verbal humor vagueness pragmatic 内 容 摘 要 1965 年 美国控制论专家扎德 L A Zadeh 提出 模糊集 理论 使模糊语言的研究开始深入 到各个不同的领域 在 1975 年伍铁平先生首次将模糊理论引入我国 这大大的加深了我国对模 糊语言的认识 但迄今为止 人们更多地关注模糊理论方面的探讨 将努力放在其语义层次上 忽视了在语用以及在其它语言中所起的作用 毫无疑问 模糊理论为语言学的其他方面的研究开拓了新的领域和提供了新的研究视角 言语幽默的兴起就是其成果之一 作为语言的本质属性 模糊不可避免地影响着人们对幽默语 言的认识和运用 在交际过程中也必然会起着积极的作用 因此 尝试着从模糊理论的角度 并借鉴前人的研究成果 运用语音模糊 语义模糊 句法模糊 指示语模糊等手段来分析言语 幽默的产生 在此基础上 本文对言语幽默的主要表现形式进行了比较详细的分析和说明 结 合大量具有较强说服力的事例 进一步加深人们对模糊语言如何产生言语幽默的认识 关键词 模糊语言 言语幽默 模糊性 语用 Contents Introduction 1 1 The Definition and Characteristics of Vague Language 3 1 1 The Definition of Vagueness 3 1 2 The Causes of Vagueness 6 1 3 The characteristics of Vague Language 8 1 3 1 Indeterminacy 8 1 3 2 Determinacy 9 1 3 3 Variability 10 2 The analysis of the production of verbal humor from vague language 10 2 1The definition of humor and verbal humor 11 2 2 Analysis of the production of verbal humor from vague language 14 2 2 1 Phonetic vagueness as a source of verbal humor 14 2 2 2 Lexical vagueness as a source of verbal humor 17 2 2 3 Deixis vagueness leading to verbal humor 20 2 2 4 Syntactic vagueness as a source of verbal humor 21 2 2 5 Discourse vagueness leading to verbal humor 23 Conclusion 25 Notes 27 Bibliography 28 Acknowledgments 30 1 Introduction People have many beliefs about language One important belief is that good usage involves clarity and precision while the uncertainty and vagueness is always to be avoided However language is influenced by nature and human thinking so it is impossible for the language to be clear and precise all the time In fact no language can make a perfectly precise description of anything A perfectly precise language is just an idealization We should acknowledge that vagueness is an inherent property of natural language Actually vague language exists universally in communication Language is required to fit the world It is known to all of us that the world is always changing and developing and many things in the world are also changing rapidly Because of this the human beings can not completely understand the changing language Besides the communicative process is very complicated and flexible and there are many factors that will influence people s use of language Therefore it will be very difficult for people to use very exact language to communicate If its vagueness is completely got rid of language will be very dull Vagueness can help us to get across our ideas or thoughts to other people to some extent It has been proved in a thousand and one ways that there are very few cases where vagueness is a rare appearance The vague theory meets the requirements of modern science to some degree and it gives people a new tool to describe the vague boundaries in human language and help to develop the vague linguistics rapidly Vague theory is now used to explain many linguistic problems deepen and widen the 2 linguistic study After vague theory is introduced into the field of linguistic study it provides a new angle to study and sets the new rules to explain the verbal humor phenomenon and has the great effect on explaining the production of verbal humor In the daily life we always want to laugh when we read a humorous story or a book But we just pay a little attention to analysis of how the verbal humor product In fact Humor is a central part of all cultures and languages Across history many researchers have studied and analyzed humor from different angles such as philosophy sociology psychology linguistics art etc While linguists only find out the incongruity existed in verbal humor they fail to explain how the verbal humor produces So we are going to analyze the humor language production from the vague language In the daily communication in order to achieve the implicit atmosphere the humorist applies the vagueness of the context or the vague language in the conversation so the hearer must understand the meaning in the right context and then he can find out the humorist s hidden motivation The essence of the verbal humor is the vagueness of its language So there is a close relationship between vague language and verbal humor We focus on to explain the production of verbal humor from vague langue by applying the different kinds of vague devices such as the phonetic vagueness lexical vagueness syntactic vagueness discourse vagueness and so on After this we can have a better understanding about the verbal humor 3 1 The Definition and Characteristics of Vague Language In the daily communication we always use vague language to achieve the humor effect So we may wonder that what the vague language is and why people apply the vague language in the everyday conversation Before we go into the production of verbal humor from verbal language we have to say something about the definition and characteristic of vague language 1 1 The Definition of Vagueness It has been proved that vague phenomena exist in every natural language in the world Although many linguists and scholars agree that vagueness is an intrinsic property of languages they have different opinions about what vagueness really is and try to define vagueness from different perspectives Analyzing it from the point of view of psychology Deese 1974 holds that vagueness of communication is inherent in the structure of our ideas rather than in language system His argument is that vagueness is a concept which only applies to the ideas which language expresses He just shifted the problem of vagueness from linguistics into psychology What he noticed however is the scope in which vagueness exists So I think that his explanation seems to be a bit far from what vagueness really is Crystal and Davy 1975 discussed the problem from the perspective of the applied linguistics Analyzing conversational English from the point of view of helping foreign learners they thought that vagueness is on a scale related to the formality of the occasion and that speakers can if they choose be more precise 1 We can see from their statement that they just state the reasons 4 why vagueness is necessary from the perspective of pragmatic functions And Black 1949 thought that vagueness of a word lies in the fact that it has a limited area of application but the border of this area is not clear His idea is in a sense much closer to the concrete definition The Chinese linguist Zhao Yuanren 1959 once pointed out that if the case in which a symbol is used at the border is more striking than that in which the symbol is used clearly the symbol is vague His definition is more convincing in that he reveals the nature of vagueness more concretely from both the semantic and pragmatic perspectives However the most appropriate and convincing definition was given by Peirce 1902 who was perhaps the first to try to formulate the notion in a rigorous way as follows A proposition is vague where there are possible states of things concerning which it is intrinsically uncertain whether had they been contemplated by the speaker he would have regarded them as excluded or allowed by the proposition By intrinsically uncertain we mean not uncertain in consequence of any ignorance of interpreter but because the speaker s habits of language were indeterminate so that one day he would regard the proposition as excluding another as admitting those states of things 2 Peirce 1902 Although his explanation is a bit more complicated we can see the point that the language system permits speakers to produce utterances without having decided whether certain facts are excluded or allowed by them For example the proposition that we have been doing a scientific research now 5 is vague where there are possible states of the time now past and future concerning which it is intrinsically uncertain No matter how we contemplate them we can not decide whether the states of now past and future are excluded or allowed by the proposition The borderline of now is uncertain because now in the proposition most probably refers to the time for all the process from making the research plan till the completion of the task A general survey of the above mentioned ideas reviews that vagueness should refer to the property that the border of the scope of things that the word or expression denotes is uncertain To be more exact vagueness means that the user of the language symbols feels that there is uncertainty in the relationship between the symbols being used and one or more than one objects that the symbols denote The semantic feature of vagueness lies in the unclear border of the objects that the symbol refers to For example traditionally if the truth condition of the proposition that she is a woman is that in the set of woman there is a member called she it is no easy job to define the semantic borderline of woman At what precise age a girl starts to be correctly referred to as a woman Clearly it is impossible to find a fixed or clear cut numerical value because the borderline of the set that woman refers to is uncertain So if there is no clear cut borderline between the objects that the symbol A refers to and that that symbol non A refers to A is vague Generally speaking concepts which many symbols express have no clear borders and therefore are so called vague concepts for example some concepts expressed by some symbols such as night morning and day are the same There is no clear cut borderline between early morning and morning 6 between afternoon and evening and between evenings and night In brief vagueness is usually taken to be a linguistic phenomenon a semantic property of types of expression of natural languages which is the property that the borderlines of the scope of a set of things that the language denotes are uncertain 1 2 The Causes of Vagueness Pierce is often considered as the originator of the notion of vagueness in language although as we will see Ullmann dates it rather earlier Ullmann 1962 in a section entitled words with blurred edges traced from Plato to Byron a recurrent feeling of the inadequacy of language to express thought He noted as the converse feeling among poets and creative writers that such vagueness is in fact an advantage Ullmann goes on to point out another important aspect of vagueness He notes that If one looks more closely at this vagueness one soon discovers that the term is itself rather vague and ambiguous the condition it refers to is not a uniform feature but has many aspects and many results from a variety of causes Some of these are inherent in the very nature of language whereas others come into play only in special circumstances 3 1962 118 He attributes vagueness to four factors a Generic character of words that is to say not single items but classes of things or events bound together by some common element For example there is a class of things referred to in English by the term bird but if we look 7 at it in more detail we see that some birds are very typically birdy robin while other birds ostrich penguin do not feel like typical birds and lack some of the central characteristics of birdiness flying perching in trees This inevitably leads to vagueness which is in some ways regrettable but it is the price we have to pay for having a means of social communication flexible enough to cope with the infinite variety of our experience b Meaning is never homogeneous which means interpretation of meaning is context bound Indisputably so but Ullmann s implication is that context will permit an exact interpretation to be put on any word Only context will specify which aspect of a person which phase in his development which side of his activities we have in mind 4 1962 124 He holds that ultimately there are exact interpretations I shall suggest that there exist at least some expressions which are always vague and for which a precise interpretation or analysis is not possible c Lack of clear cut boundaries in the non linguistic world which means the non linguistic world is vague A standard example here would be to ask oneself when a hill becomes large enough to qualify as a mountain or at what precise age a girl starts to be correctly referred to as a woman Since the non linguistic world is vague it is very difficult for us to draw a clear cut boundary d Lack of familiarity with what the words stand for which means during conversations where people seem to be not quite sure of what they are talking about so they have to give some uncertain information So linguistic vagueness is not gratuitous it is caused by the world in which language is 8 used Ullmann 1962 124 Vagueness is referred to in a very different context by Crystal and Davy 1975 in an applied linguistics textbook which accompanied a series of recordings of natural conversations They put forward the view that vagueness is on a scale related to the formality of the occasion and that speakers can if they choose be more precise They give four reasons for vagueness a memory loss the speaker forgets the correct word b the language has no suitable exact word or the speaker does not know it c the subject of the conversation is not such that it requires precision and an approximation or characterization will do and d the choice of a vague item is deliberate to maintain the atmosphere 1 3 The characteristics of Vague Language The main characteristics of vague language in intercultural communi cation are indeterminacy determinacy and variability 1 3 1 Indeterminacy Actually vague language indicates the referential Indefiniteness in natural language Take the word tall as an example When we say that someone is tall we mean that his or her height is above a certain norm or average Such interpretation does not provide a vague reading since it merely explains the relation between words Vagueness emerges when we try to work out the referential meaning namely within what scope of height is a person unanimously considered to be tall The norm varies A tall female may 9 not be tall compared to the standard for a male Similarly a tall male may not be considered tall compared to a tall professional male basketball player A tall Asian may be taken as just of average height in European eyes Thus vagueness comes into being due to different culture background and peoples failure to draw a clear cut referential boundary for the expression concerned In a word indeterminacy is the most distinctive characteristic of vague language in intercultural communication 1 3 2 Determinacy The fact that we attach great importance to indeterminacy does not imply of course that we should ignore the definite part of vague language Determinacy is the foundation of the communication As Crystal s definition indicates the vague words consist of an invariant core with variable or vague boundaries That is to say both definite and indefinite members are indispensable in building up a vague category In fact in most cases the former cases outnumber the latter Take the vague word youth as example We might feel a little uncertain whether a person in his forties can still be taken as young but we do not hesitate to include people in their twenties who construct the definite core of this vague category The membership category varies in this way the more an age is away from that core the more we become suspicious When it is far enough to get into the core of another category however we exclude it decisively Determinacy in this sense together with the definition of the core contributes to the certainty of vague language In fact the determinate part 10 always plays the leading role in deciding the meaning of the vague language and thus provides the word a relatively fixed interpretation 1 3 3 Variability By variability we are mainly interested in two facts First vague language is not necessarily vague all the time In some cases it may get a precise reading For example soft may lose its vagueness when it appears in soft beverage Second the scope that a vague category covers is also changeable An example given by Leech shows that the scope of a vague category might get changed with different social status vocations and culture The famous linguist pointed out that young man generally referred to a male between 16 or 17 to 30 while young archbishop habitually ranged from 45 to 60 On the other hand a dancer in his forties could only be taken as old since dancers are supposed to be young while the privileged archbishop cannot be too immature This interesting fact suggests that in studying the vague language the socia