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Introduction

1.  Significance of the Research
Mark  Twain  is  the  most  outstanding  writer  in  American  literature  history;  his verbal humor is quite famous all around the world and is the immortal theme of the research. The classical literatures of Mark Twain belong to the American literatures of the 1950s and 1960s. As a representative of critical realism, his literature works are anchored in social reality and expose many social current problems. The researches at home  and  abroad  on  Mark  Twain’s  verbal  humor  are  prosperous  and  innumerable, ranging from the artistic features of his verbal humor, the innate origin of his verbal humor, to the translation of his verbal humor. Besides the researches on Mark Twain’s verbal humor, his literature works not only are deeply favored by the western readers, but also draw attention of the readers from China and any other countries. President  William  Howard  Traft  commented  on  Mark  Twain  that  Mark  Twain gave pleasure---real intellectual enjoyment---to millions, and his works will continue to give such pleasure to millions yet to come... His humor was American, but he was nearly  as  much  appreciated  by  Englishmen  and  people  of  other  countries  as  by  his own countrymen. He has made an enduring part of American literature.1 Humor  is  such  a  complex  language  phenomenon  that  many  different  theories have  been  formulated  to  tackle  it.  Among  them,  three  are  more  conventional---they are  respectively  the  superiority  theory,  the  incongruity  theory  and  the  relief theory---and three are advanced more recently, ---They are respectively the semantic script  theory  of  humor,  the  general  theory  of  verbal  humor  and  the  audience-based theory  of  verbal  humor.  In  this  case,  does  there  exist  any  common  denominator underlying all these diverse theories of verbal humor? If any, what is it? Since script opposition as advocated in both semantic script theory of humor and general theory of verbal humor provides a practical tool for analyzing verbal humor, it is our view that we  can  combine  the  adaptation  theory  and  the  mental  space  theory  together  to  deal with  verbal  humor  if,  on  the  other  hand,  we  treat  “script”  as  being  conceptually equivalent to the notion of “mental space” in the mental space, and on the other hand, we  believe  simultaneous  adaptation  to  two  somewhat  opposing  scripts  or  mental spaces is the key to the interpretation of verbal humor. 
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2.  Research methodology
The language data used in this thesis are adopted from the novels of Mark Twain, The  Adventures  of  Tom  Sawyer  and  The  Adventures  of  Hu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。