Abstract

 Humor, a common phenomenon, plays an essential role in our daily life. Researches on humor have been conducted by numerous scholars and researchers from various perspectives. However, comprehensive studies on humor are still in great needs since the use and understanding of humor is closely related to social, cultural and cognitive factors. Therefore, it is still necessary to make a further study on humor.
This paper aims to analyze English humorous utterances in the light of Verschueren’s Adaptation Theory, which claims that the use of language is a process of choice making and the study of language takes cognitive, social and cultural factors into consideration. Linguistic adaptation could be examined from four angles and this paper is based on contextual correlates of adaptability. Under the Theory of Adaptation, this thesis tries to find what linguistic strategies communicators choose when humor is used as a strategy to realize their communicative goals and what factors they adapt to when making choices. After analysis, it has been found that kinds of linguistics strategies are chosen and they adapt to the physical situations, mental intentions, social and cultural conventions with regard to communicative context.

KEYWORDS:humor; Adaptation Theory; making choices; communicative context

摘  要

无处不在的幽默现象在日常生活中起着重要作用，并已受到众多不同学术领域专家学者的广泛关注与研究。然而，我们还需对幽默进行综合性的探索。 因为幽默的使用和理解与社会，文化和认知因素有着不可分割的关系。因此， 我们有必要对幽默做进一步的探索与研究。
本文试图在Verschueren 的顺应论视角下研究英语幽默话语。该理论认为使用语言是不断做出选择的过程且研究语言需考虑社会文化和认知等因素。本文主要研究幽默话语对语境关系的顺应来解释语言的使用。在顺应论框架下，本文试图探讨当人们选择幽默交际策略来实现交际目的时，会做出哪些语言选择；在做选择时，又会顺应哪些因素？经过分析， 我们发现在交际语境范围内，他们采用一些交际策略，且会顺应物理世界，心理世界以及社会世界等因素。

关键词:幽默；顺应论；做出选择；交际语境

1. Introduction
Humor is omnipresent in all cultures and human communications, and the recognition and proper utilization of it can facilitate our communicative capacity as well as avoid pragmatic failure in communication. Therefore, it is of practical importance to study the phenomenon of English humor.