TED演讲中言语幽默的语用分析
幽默是人类特有的表达情感的方式,幽默的语言能拉近人们的距离,是人们沟通情感的捷径,可以吸引人们的注意力,也是公共演讲的强效催化剂。几千年来,人们已经从不同的角度来研究幽默,包括心理学,社会学,语用学等角度。对幽默的研究不但成为了语用学研究的重要课题之一,也已经日渐成为对促进文化交流的探索中不可或缺的一部分。TED演讲以交流思想、分享观点为初衷,它最大特点就是演讲者没有专业冗长的报告,语言形式简洁幽默,通俗易懂。因此,TED演讲是分析幽默语言,探索幽默生成机制的最佳的分析语料。本文选取了TED演讲中的一些幽默片段作为分析案例,运用语用学方法进行分析,来探索幽默语言的产生及其产生的效果。并对TED演讲中幽默案例进行介绍并进行语用分析。研究发现,幽默的本质是不协调,它是通过语境理解和认知失调的差异来实现的。通过打破或服从语用理论,使双方对语境的不同理解而产生乖讹,从而引发幽默。
关键词:TED演讲,英语幽默,语用学, 乖讹
A Pragmatic Analysis of English Verbal Humor Generation in TED Talks
Abstract
Humor is a specific way for human to express one’s feeling. Humor language can narrow the distance between people, which is a shortcut to communicate emotions. Humor language can attract people’s attention, so it is also an indispensable part of a good speech. For thousands of years, people have been studying humor from different angles, including psychology, sociology, pragmatics and other perspectives. Searching humor has becoming an important Pragmatics subject and the research of humor tends to be a significant part in promoting cultural exchange. TED talks’ original intention is to exchange and share ideas, and its biggest feature is that it has no tedious professional report, its language forms are tidy and humorous and easy to understand, thus, it is the best study materials of searching the humor language. This paper selected some amusing humorous effect in TED talks as the analysis cases, by analyzing the pragmatic function to explore the reason how humor language generated and the resulting effect of humor. After analyzed the humorous theory reflection in the humor case and the pragmatics functions, the paper found that humor generated based on incongruity, and it is expressed by the contextual understanding differences and cognitive dissonance. The humor always produced by breaking or complying with the pragmatic theory to make each side have a different understanding in context to produce incongruity.
Key words: TED talks; English humor; Pragmatics; Incongruity