Comparison of English and Chinese Verbal Humor 英语论文.doc

Comparison of English and Chinese Verbal Humor In this chapter, the detail contrastive parts of English and Chinese verbal humor will be described in detail, such as figures of speech, lexical, syntactic, and ambiguous part. . 2.1 Figures of Speech Aspect “By figures of speech we refer those rhetorical devices termed tropes in classical rhetoric. Tropes have to do with the way words are made to mean other than what they would normally imply, and therefore involve deviation from the ordinary and literal meaning of words”(Feng 1996:157). Figures of Speech are the important means for humor production in both English and Chinese. Besides, some figures of speech correspond between English and Chinese. 2.1.1 Pun vs.双关 According to the Webster’s New World Dictionary, “Pun is the humorous use of a word, or of words which are formed or sounded alike but have different meanings, in such a way as to play on two or more of the possible applications”. (Li 2000:189) Therefore we can define it as a clever and amusing use of a word with more than one meaning, or a word that sounds like another word, so that what you say has two different meanings. There are two types of puns; one is homophone that combines two words with different meanings and spellings but which sound alike, e.g. (1) “Who is calling?” was the answer to the telephone. “Watt.” “What’s your name, please?” “Watt’s my name.” “That’s what I asked you. What’s your name?” “That’s what I told you. Watt’s my name. A long pause, and then, from Watt, “is this James Brown?” “No, this is Knott.” “Please tell me your name.” “Will Knott” Where upon they both hung up. (Ye Bei, 2006:12) In his joke the amusing misunderstanding between Mr. Watt and Mr. Knott resulted from the homophones of their names, “what” and “not”. And the other is homograph that uses a word or words with two or more meanings. The multiple meanings are represented by the same word, spelled the same way, e.g. (2) “If I lay