Linguistic Formation-Mechanism of Humor in English

DOI

10.2991/meici-18.2018.25How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Linguistic formation-mechanism; Syntax; Semantics; Rhetoric

Abstract

Humorous language is everywhere. It is just like the seasoning in our food, making our conversation and life interesting, joyful and colorful. According to Palmer, a mechanism of humor may be concluded as follows: 1) Knowledge that the occasion is ‘entertainment’ which would act both as a humor stimulus and a brake on the sense of threat. (Here, the audience should be alert to the linguistic and paralinguistic form of the utterance which would signal the intention to joke.) 2) The incongruity is itself sufficiently acute to cause arousal but insufficiently acute to provide a threat. 3) Locating the comic meaning reveals retrospectively that the incongruity was not threatening. (Pamler, 1994: 100) Individual verbal humor is achieved mainly through language. People may use the rich variations of language elements to elicit humorous effect. In this paper, through the analysis of some common types of humor, the author tries to discover what makes a joke or humorous story funny from various linguistic aspects such as syntax, semantics, rhetoric, and so on.

Copyright

© 2018, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Weiqing Wang
PY  - 2018/12
DA  - 2018/12
TI  - Linguistic Formation-Mechanism of Humor in English
BT  - Proceedings of the 2018 8th International Conference on Management, Education and Information (MEICI 2018)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 126
EP  - 130
SN  - 1951-6851
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/meici-18.2018.25
DO  - 10.2991/meici-18.2018.25
ID  - Wang2018/12
ER  -