Linguistic Formation-Mechanism of Humor in English

摘要

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.