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成成 都都 理理 工工 大大 学学 学生毕业设计 论文 文献综述报告学生毕业设计 论文 文献综述报告 学生姓名 张露学号 200811010418专业名称 英语 文献综述题目 A Pragmatic Analysis of English Humor Literature Review 英语幽默语用浅析文献综述 引用文献 中文 6篇 英文9 篇 其它语种 0 篇 其中期刊 3种 专著12本 其它 0 种 引用文献时间跨度 1962 2006 年 指导教师审阅签名签名 综述报告正文 综述报告正文 A Pragmatic Analysis of English Humor Literature Review Different researches of humor appear in different periods Traditionally there exist three dominant theories Superiority Theory Release Theory and Incongruity Theory Currently the Script based Semantic Theory General Theory and Audience based Theory have held people s attention In the following this paper will make a detailed account of the six theories mentioned above 1 Traditional Theories on Humor 1 1 Superiority Theory Superiority theory which is also called degradation disparagement and derision theory has a long history It derives from Aristotle s 384 322 BC view that comedy is based on an imitation of men worse than the average of people who are ridiculous which accounts for the pleasure one feels when the less fortunate and less desirable figures are laughed at Though it deals with the nature of comedy it can also be applied to humor because in the broad sense the two are interchangeable though comedy is technically speaking a literary form Berger 1993 Plato 427 347BC suggests that all humor can be explained by this theory People laugh whenever someone or something is degraded so they can feel themselves superior Later Thomas Hobbes develops their views in that laughter bears on one s social status and superiority over one s peers He 1651 explains that humans are in constant competitions with each other and looking for shortcomings of other persons Laughing at the inferior builds our self confidence and makes us feel superior Because of their emphasis on the interpersonal and social aspect of humor superiority theories are of considerable interest to the sociolinguists of humor However this theory is not so popular now as it was in ancient times because not any humor can display a superior inferior relationship and the feelings of superiority is not enough to explain why people laugh What s more sometimes instead of being amused we would rather pity those who are inferior and suffering 1 2 Release Theory This theory is primarily a psychological one about humor closely associated with Freud In his book Jokes and Their Relation to Unconscious 1960 Freud states that there is a strong link between the unconscious and both jokes and dreams and that the latter two employ similar techniques condensation displacement to carry out their joke work and dream work As for the material that causes amusement he distinguishes between jokes wits the comic and humor Each of them involves a saving or economizing of energy which having become unnecessary for its normal purposes is dissipated in the form of laughter jokes allow economies in expenditure on inhibition and suppression the comic on ideation thinking and humor on emotion Freud explains that the psychic energy in our body is built as an aid for suppressing feelings in taboo areas like sex or death When this energy is released laughter can be experienced not only because this energy is released but also these taboo thoughts are being entertained A more conventional version of this theory is that a pleasant sensation is experienced when humor replaces negative feelings like pains or sadness Freud 1960 comments that the feeling of propriety that prevents us from insulting someone directly can be overcome if the insult is expressed in the form of a joke Lippitt 1995 argues that this is not always the case Under some circumstances even when the butt of the joke feels obliged to join in the pleasure rather than be seen as lacking a sense of humor he can be left looking foolish while the joker superior That is such an insult joking can be even more wounding than a direct insult in which the insulter s behavior may be socially censored and the insulted person receives sympathy Herbert Spencer 1977 also discusses release in relation to laughter but his is chiefly a physiological explanation which sees laughter as the discharge of nervous energy triggered by simple emotions He proposes that as a response to the comical the comical inexorably signifies some sort of incongruity but this incongruity must carry a descending character In other words in a comical situation something large is expected and something small is found This is what is called a descending incongruity On the contrary if something large is suddenly discovered instead of something small a feeling of ascending incongruity is obtained As to the above point Lorenz 1996 proposes that most jokes provoke laughter by building up a tension which is then suddenly and unexpectedly exploded 1 3 Incongruity Theory The incongruity theory of humor virtually dominating contemporary psychological researches on humor is the most influential approach adopted to the problem Raskin 1985 Incongruity theory enjoying a long history may go back as far as to the Greeks and the Renaissance Attardo 1994 However it is formally proposed by Kant and Schopenhauer Kant a scholar in the eighteenth century is credited to have made the full conceptualization of incongruity first He says that humor arises from the sudden transformation of a strained expectation into nothing Attardo 1997 396 According to Schopenhauer s definition of laughter incongruity is explicitly mentioned The cause of laughter in every case is simply the sudden perception of the incongruity between a concept and the real objects which have been thought through it in some relation and laughter itself is just the expression of this incongruity Attardo 1997 396 397 The basic assumption of this theory is that humor arises from the perception of an element of incongruity The notion of incongruity refers to the abnormal contradictory unexpected or illogical relationship between components of an idea object event or social expectation In this sense incongruity is an essential laughter eliciting mechanism However it is agreed by the majority that it is not the incongruity but the congruous resolution of the apparent incongruity that makes a certain situation funny The contemporary conceptualization in psychology views incongruity resolution IR model as two stage models In the first stage the perceiver finds his her expectations about the text disconfirmed by the ending of the joke In other words the recipient encounters an incongruity the punch line In the second stage the perceiver engages in a form of problem solving to find a cognitive rule which makes the punch line follow from the main part of the joke and reconciles the incongruous parts Suls 1972 82 The incongruity theory provides a helpful approach to the study of humor and laughter and partially explains why humor makes us laugh However it has some weaknesses First it does not explain specifically how incongruity arises in humor second it fails to explain why some data which involve incongruity are not humorous at all Instead they make people feel disappointed puzzled and even angry Curco 1998 Although the three traditional approaches characterize the complex phenomena of humor from very different angles yet they seem to be in nice supplementation with each other The incongruity theory makes a statement about the stimulus the superiority theory characterizes the relations or attitudes between the speaker and hearer and the release relief theory comments on the feelings and psychology of the hearer 2 Modern Linguistic Theories on Humor As Raskin 1985 notes while dealing primarily with examples of verbal humor the classical theories do not offer any significant insights into the linguistics of humor Until the late twenty years linguists began to set foot in the field and linguistic survey of humor gradually receives increasing interest which makes remarkable contributions to the humor researches This section will take a close look at the previous linguistic studies on humor 2 1 Script based Semantic Theory of Humor Raskin s script based semantic theory of humor 1985 was the first linguistic based theory of humor Raskin s theory posits that the text of a joke is always fully or partly compatible with two distinct scripts and that the two scripts are opposed to each other in a special way The punchline triggers the switch from one script to the other by making the hearer backtrack and realizes that a different interpretation of the joke was possible from the very beginning Attardo Raskin 1991 308 2 2 General Theory of Verbal Humor In the revision of Raskin s script based semantic theory of humor Attardo and Raskin 1991 collaborate to put forth a General Theory of Verbal Humor GTVH based on six knowledge resources KRs namely script opposition logical mechanism situation including the audience target narrative strategy and language This new theory incorporates subsumes and revises Raskin 1991 329 Raskin s script based semantic theory and Attardo s five level model but still concentrates virtually exclusively on the text of the joke 2 3 Audience based Theory of Verbal Humor The Audience Based Theory of Verbal Humor Carrel 1993 posits that humor resides with the audience and thus nothing is inherently humorous That explains why some joke texts will succeed on the part of one audience and fail on another The humor event is made up of four necessary constituents the joke teller the joke text the object of laughter and the audience all of which exist within a particular situation and complement with each other in the humor event Or put it another way the four constituents are in co existent relationship with each other Different people from different times have done different work on pragmatic analysis of English humor Nobody can finish the study we can try more ways to get the answer about the relation between humor and pragmatics even the relation with linguistics Now we already can explain humor with Grice cooperative principle speech act theory and rel