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Chapter One Literature Review

Humor is a kind of wise language, an extraordinary life wisdom and it not onlymeans funny talking but a happy, mature and an optimistic life attitude. Therefore,humor plays a necessary part in social life since it runs through all aspects of people’severyday life. However, it is much more complex than people could imagine. Manytheories attempt to define what humor is and what social function it has, and so manyscholars spare no effort to concentrate on it, but there is no fixed common definitionof humor which can be universally accepted, because it has been researched from avariety of perspectives. What’s more, even in the same study field, it is still difficultto work out an agreed definition of humor. In this chapter, the author will firstly referto the definition of humor by accumulating the previous research fruits. Secondly thethree basic theories on humor will be introduced in this part, including SuperiorityTheory, Incongruity Theory and Relief Theory. Thirdly the author will present thepreceding Linguistic Studies of Humor at Home and Abroad and discuss the problemsexisting in the study of humor.

幽默是一种明智的语言，平凡的生活智慧，它不仅意味着有趣的谈话，而是一种快乐，成熟和乐观的生活态度。因此，幽默在社会生活中发挥的必要组成部分，因为它贯穿于人们的日常生活的各个方面。然而，它比人们能想象的要复杂得多。许多理论试图去定义什么是幽默，它有什么样的社会功能，所以许多学者不遗余力专注于它，但没有固定的幽默可以普遍接受的共同定义，因为它已经从各种研究的观点。更重要的是，即使在同一个研究领域，它仍然是困难的工作，幽默的定义达成一致。在本章中，笔者将首先referto幽默的定义通过积累先前的研究成果。其次幽默和谐社会的三个基本理论在这一部分中，将推出包括优势理论不协调理论与救济的理论。第三，作者将介绍国内外的前面幽默的语言研究和讨论幽默的研究中存在的问题。

1.1 Definition of Humor
The term “humor” is originated from Latin word “hyyros”, whose originalmeaning is “liquid” or “fluid”. Obviously the “humor” here refers to the narrow sense,but people’s understanding of humor has experienced a lot of changes with the socialdevelopment, thus what I will talk about in this thesis means “humor” in the broadsense, including joke, satire, comedy, etc. In addition, the researchers have beenstriving for a definition of humor from various perspectives, which leads to differentdefinitions of humor, and there is no agreed one universally accepted. However, theresearchers have made plenty of achievements in this field from the followingintroductions arranged by chronological order in different periods and from differentviewpoints.The Greek doctor Hippcrates(460BC----377?BC), known as the father of westernmedical Science, thinks that humor is one of the body fluids and the body fluid iscomposed of blood, mucus, yellow bile, black bile and so on, the percentage of whichaffects people’s character and temperament. Perhaps this is related to the temperament classification of the ancient Greek because they think that people who have rich bloodare much more humorous, according to the understanding in early westernphysiological theory.
The classical philosopher Marcus Fabius Quintilianus (about 35-95) defineshumor as a “talent” with “certain imperious forces of its own”. Those “forces” togreat extent rely on how the audience receives and reacts to humor. Nevertheless,humor tends to dispel the “graver emotions of the judge by exciting his laughter” andthe emotions contain anger, hatred, sorrow and so on. Quintilian states clearly that thepurpose of humor in rhetoric is to scatter grave emotions of the audience by excitinglaughter, take the audience’s mind off and to make them feel refreshed when they arebored. While Marcus Tullius Cicero(106BC-43BC) holds the idea that humor ishelpf本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。