关联理论视角下的《哈利·波特》中的幽默乖讹与消解
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摘要
《哈利.波特》是英国女作家罗琳女士所作的一系列共七本魔幻小说,虚构的角色但其语言包含了丰富的幽默表达。幽默研究属于复杂的认知语用现象,其历史可以追溯至古希腊。柏拉图、亚里士多德、康德、佛洛依德、奥图多等世界著名学者都曾对这一现象进行研究。这些学者从社会学,心理分析和认知的角度做了许多研究并发展出许多颇具影响力的理论分支,如:优越论、乖讹论、宽慰论等。迄今,关于《哈利.波特》国内和国外的学者做了许多研究,然而他们极少涉猎小说中的幽默言语特别是从认知和语用的角度。为了弥补这一不足,本文旨在由乖讹消解理论和关联理论所构成的框架下对《哈利.波特》中的幽默言语进行阐释。
根据乖讹消解理论,乖讹是幽默产生的先决条件。理解幽默涉及三个步骤即:“设置-乖讹-消解”,被称为SIR模型。但对一些学者而言乖讹和消解两个过程是同时发生且相互融合的。本文以《哈利.波特》中的幽默会话片段为例,从认知乖讹,语义乖讹,逻辑乖讹和心理乖讹的角度详细阐释幽默的形成机制。小说中幽默的消解过程是框架转移和概念整合的过程。在幽默分析过程中,阐释者使输入言语形成一个框架,但是言语本身和阐释者心理期待相反因而会形成认知、心理、语义和逻辑的乖讹,这时阐释者就把旧的框架转换成新的,因此使之前形成的乖讹得以消解。另外幽默的消解过程也是一个潜意识的过程涉及整合不同心理空间中形成的概念。
根据关联理论的观点,《哈利.波特》中的幽默对话也是一个明示-推理的过程。说话者明示他的信息意图和交际意图,听话者通过在不同的认知环境中整合编码的语言信息和语境假设推理出说话者幽默言语建构的交际意图。小说作者为了达到幽默制笑的交际目的,给听话者提供了一系列的言语明示以建构认知,心理,语义和逻辑的乖讹,而读者通过消解这些乖讹来达到语境效果和幽默效果。小说中的对话者追求的是最佳关联而并非最大关联。
结论指出,幽默制笑的机制是值得广泛和深入研究的问题,本文的研究希望可以帮助读者更深入的理解《哈利.波特》小说中的幽默,拓展这一系列小说的研究领域。
Harry Potter is a series of seven fantasy novels written by the British author J. K. Rowling, which contains a plenty of humorous language expressions and fictional characters. Humor is a complicated cognitive and pragmatic phenomenon and its history can be traced back to ancient Greek. Many world-famous scholars such as Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Freud, Attardo have extended great interest in such a phenomenon. Previous researches on humor have been conducted mainly from sociological, psychoanalytic and cognitive perspectives, which have yielded a variety of influential research products such as the classic humor theories of Superiority Theory, Incongruity Theory and Relief/Release Theory. So far, domestic and foreign scholars have done a lot of reseaches on Harry Potter. However, they have seldom touched upon its humorous language, especially from cognitive and pragmatic perspectives. To fill such a gap, this present thesis is aimed to interpret the humorous language in Harry Potter series within the theoretical framework constituted by Incongruity-Resolution Theory and Relevance Theory.
According to the Incongruity-Resolution Theory, humor is perceived at the moment of realizing the existence of incongruity. The understanding of humorous messages involves a three-step process, that is, Setup-Incongruity-Resolution, which is called SIR model. But to some scholars, the incongruity and resolution steps happen simultaneously and are integrated together. In the humorous snatches of conversations chosen from Harry Potter series, cognitive incongruity, semantic incongruity, logical incongruity and psychological incongruity are revealed in detail in the interpretation of the machanisms for humor formation. The resolution of humor incongruity in Harry Potter is a process of frame-shifting and conceptual integration. In the process of humor interpretation, the humor perceivers first try to construct a frame-based representation of the inputted sentence meaning, which, however, results in a cognitive, psychological, semantic or logical incongruity with what they have expected or understood, and then they shift from the old frame to a new one in order to resolve the incongruity. Besides, resolution of humor inconguity is also a subconscious process which involves the integration or blending of some concepts originating from different mental spaces.
From the perspective of Relevance Theory, the humorous conversations in Harry Potter also belong to a kind of ostensive-inferential communication, which involves the speaker’s ostension of his informative and communicative intentions and the hearers’inference of the speaker’s communicative intention of humor construction through the combination of the encoded linguistic message and the contextual assumptions drawn from their cognitive environments. The writer of Harry Potter series makes her communicative intention of constructing humor and eliciting laughter manifest to the readers through producing a variety of ostensive linguistic stimuli to establish a cognitive, psychological, semantic or logical incongruity while the readers get the contextual effect or humorous effect of the conversations in Harry Potter through the relief of the cognitive, psychological, semantic or logical incongruity. The humor communicator of Harry Potter is oriented towards optimal relevance rather than maximal relevance.
This thesis is concluded by pointing out that the working mechanism for humor production and interpretation is a problem worthy of more extensive and penetrating researches and extending the hope that the present research could make some contribution to the readers’better understanding of the humor feature in Harry Potter and to the extension of the research fields of Harry Potter series.
根据乖讹消解理论,乖讹是幽默产生的先决条件。理解幽默涉及三个步骤即:“设置-乖讹-消解”,被称为SIR模型。但对一些学者而言乖讹和消解两个过程是同时发生且相互融合的。本文以《哈利.波特》中的幽默会话片段为例,从认知乖讹,语义乖讹,逻辑乖讹和心理乖讹的角度详细阐释幽默的形成机制。小说中幽默的消解过程是框架转移和概念整合的过程。在幽默分析过程中,阐释者使输入言语形成一个框架,但是言语本身和阐释者心理期待相反因而会形成认知、心理、语义和逻辑的乖讹,这时阐释者就把旧的框架转换成新的,因此使之前形成的乖讹得以消解。另外幽默的消解过程也是一个潜意识的过程涉及整合不同心理空间中形成的概念。
根据关联理论的观点,《哈利.波特》中的幽默对话也是一个明示-推理的过程。说话者明示他的信息意图和交际意图,听话者通过在不同的认知环境中整合编码的语言信息和语境假设推理出说话者幽默言语建构的交际意图。小说作者为了达到幽默制笑的交际目的,给听话者提供了一系列的言语明示以建构认知,心理,语义和逻辑的乖讹,而读者通过消解这些乖讹来达到语境效果和幽默效果。小说中的对话者追求的是最佳关联而并非最大关联。
结论指出,幽默制笑的机制是值得广泛和深入研究的问题,本文的研究希望可以帮助读者更深入的理解《哈利.波特》小说中的幽默,拓展这一系列小说的研究领域。
Harry Potter is a series of seven fantasy novels written by the British author J. K. Rowling, which contains a plenty of humorous language expressions and fictional characters. Humor is a complicated cognitive and pragmatic phenomenon and its history can be traced back to ancient Greek. Many world-famous scholars such as Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Freud, Attardo have extended great interest in such a phenomenon. Previous researches on humor have been conducted mainly from sociological, psychoanalytic and cognitive perspectives, which have yielded a variety of influential research products such as the classic humor theories of Superiority Theory, Incongruity Theory and Relief/Release Theory. So far, domestic and foreign scholars have done a lot of reseaches on Harry Potter. However, they have seldom touched upon its humorous language, especially from cognitive and pragmatic perspectives. To fill such a gap, this present thesis is aimed to interpret the humorous language in Harry Potter series within the theoretical framework constituted by Incongruity-Resolution Theory and Relevance Theory.
According to the Incongruity-Resolution Theory, humor is perceived at the moment of realizing the existence of incongruity. The understanding of humorous messages involves a three-step process, that is, Setup-Incongruity-Resolution, which is called SIR model. But to some scholars, the incongruity and resolution steps happen simultaneously and are integrated together. In the humorous snatches of conversations chosen from Harry Potter series, cognitive incongruity, semantic incongruity, logical incongruity and psychological incongruity are revealed in detail in the interpretation of the machanisms for humor formation. The resolution of humor incongruity in Harry Potter is a process of frame-shifting and conceptual integration. In the process of humor interpretation, the humor perceivers first try to construct a frame-based representation of the inputted sentence meaning, which, however, results in a cognitive, psychological, semantic or logical incongruity with what they have expected or understood, and then they shift from the old frame to a new one in order to resolve the incongruity. Besides, resolution of humor inconguity is also a subconscious process which involves the integration or blending of some concepts originating from different mental spaces.
From the perspective of Relevance Theory, the humorous conversations in Harry Potter also belong to a kind of ostensive-inferential communication, which involves the speaker’s ostension of his informative and communicative intentions and the hearers’inference of the speaker’s communicative intention of humor construction through the combination of the encoded linguistic message and the contextual assumptions drawn from their cognitive environments. The writer of Harry Potter series makes her communicative intention of constructing humor and eliciting laughter manifest to the readers through producing a variety of ostensive linguistic stimuli to establish a cognitive, psychological, semantic or logical incongruity while the readers get the contextual effect or humorous effect of the conversations in Harry Potter through the relief of the cognitive, psychological, semantic or logical incongruity. The humor communicator of Harry Potter is oriented towards optimal relevance rather than maximal relevance.
This thesis is concluded by pointing out that the working mechanism for humor production and interpretation is a problem worthy of more extensive and penetrating researches and extending the hope that the present research could make some contribution to the readers’better understanding of the humor feature in Harry Potter and to the extension of the research fields of Harry Potter series.
引文
Anatol, G. L. Reading Harry Potter: Critical Essay [M]. Westport: Praeger Publishers, 2003.
Attardo, S. & V. Raskin. Script theory revis(it)ed: joke similarity and joke representation model [J]. Humor: International Journal of Humor Research, 1991: 280–347.
Attardo, S. Linguistic Theories of Humor [M]. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1994.
Attardo, S. Humorous Texts: A Semantic and Pragmatic Analysis [M]. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2001.
Attardo, S., et al. Script oppositions and logical mechanisms: Modeling incongruities and their resolutions [J]. Humor: International Journal of Humor Research, 2002: 3-46.
Baggett, D., et al. Harry Potter and Philosophy: If Aristotle Ran Hogwarts [M]. Ilinois: Open Court, 2004.
Baumann, M. C. A Detective’s Analysis of Harry Potter and the Mysteries Within [M]. Bloomington: Authorhouse, 2004.
Coulson, S. Semantic Leaps: Frame-shifting and Conceptual Blending in Meaning Construction [M]. Cambridge: CUP, 2000.
Fauconnier, G. Conceptual blending and analogy [A]. The Analogical Mind: Perspectives from Cognitive Science [C]. Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2001. 255-286.
Fauconnier, G. & M.Turner. Blending as a central process of grammar [A]. In A. Goldberg (ed.). Conceptual Structure, Discourse and Language [C]. Stanford: CSLI Publications, 1996. 113-129.
Fauconnier, G. & M. Turner. Conceptual Integration Networks [M]. Stanford: CSLIPublications, 1998.
Freud, S. Jokes and Their Relation to Unconscious [M]. London: Penguin Books, 1976.
Gruner, C. R. The Game of Humor: A Comprehensive Theory of Why We Laugh [M]. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1997.
Hazlitt, W. The Complete Work of William Hazilitt [M]. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987.
Heilman, E. Harry Potter’s World: Multidisciplinary Critical Perspectives [M] London: Falmer Press, 2003.
Koestler, A. The Act of Creation [M]. Westminster: Penguin Books, 1964.
Hofstadter, D. & L. Gabora. Synopsis of the workshop on humor and cognition [J]. Humor: International Journal of Humor Research, 1989, (2-4): 417-440.
McGhee, P. E. Humor, Its Origin and Development [M]. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman and Company, 1979.
Mulkay, M. On Humour: Its Nature and Its Place in Modern Society [M], Cambridge: Polity Press,1998.
Palmer, J. Taking Humour Seriously [M]. London: Routledge, 1994.
Schopenhauer, A. The World as Will and Idea [M]. NewYork: Harper & Row, 1968.
Sperber, D. & D. Wilson. Irony and the use-mention distinction [A]. In S. Davis (ed.)
Pragmatics. A Reader [C]. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991, 550–563.
Sperber, D. & D. Wilson. Relevance: Communication and Cognition [M]. Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, 2001.
Suls, J. M. A two-stage model for the appreciation of jokes and cartoons: An information-processing analysis [A]. In L. Kline (ed.) The Psychology of Humor [C]. New York: Academic Press, 1972: 81-100.
Turner, M. & G. Fauconnier. Conceptual integration and formal expression [J]. Journal of Metaphor and Symbolic Activity, 1995: 183-204.
Veatch, T. C. A theory of humor [J]. Humor: International Journal of HumorResearch, 1998: 161-215.
Whited, L. The Ivory Tower and Harry Potter: Perspectives on the Literary Phenomenon [M]. Missouri: Missouri Press, 2004.
Wilson, D. Relevance and understanding [A]. In G. Brown, et al. (eds.) Language and Understanding [C]. Shanghai: Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press, 1994. 35-58.
Wilson, D. & D. Sperber. Relevance theory [A]. In L. Horn & G. Ward (eds.) Handbook of Pragmatics [C]. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004: 607-632.
叶舒宪.巫术思维与文学的复活:《哈利·波特》现象的文化阐释[J].文艺研究, 2002a, (3); 56-62.
叶舒宪.《哈利·波特》与后现代文化寻根[J].海南广播电视大学学报, 2002b, (2): 31-35.
叶舒宪.凯尔特文化复兴思潮与《哈利·波特》[J].瞭望新闻周刊, 2002c, (1): 56-58.
Attardo, S. & V. Raskin. Script theory revis(it)ed: joke similarity and joke representation model [J]. Humor: International Journal of Humor Research, 1991: 280–347.
Attardo, S. Linguistic Theories of Humor [M]. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1994.
Attardo, S. Humorous Texts: A Semantic and Pragmatic Analysis [M]. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2001.
Attardo, S., et al. Script oppositions and logical mechanisms: Modeling incongruities and their resolutions [J]. Humor: International Journal of Humor Research, 2002: 3-46.
Baggett, D., et al. Harry Potter and Philosophy: If Aristotle Ran Hogwarts [M]. Ilinois: Open Court, 2004.
Baumann, M. C. A Detective’s Analysis of Harry Potter and the Mysteries Within [M]. Bloomington: Authorhouse, 2004.
Coulson, S. Semantic Leaps: Frame-shifting and Conceptual Blending in Meaning Construction [M]. Cambridge: CUP, 2000.
Fauconnier, G. Conceptual blending and analogy [A]. The Analogical Mind: Perspectives from Cognitive Science [C]. Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2001. 255-286.
Fauconnier, G. & M.Turner. Blending as a central process of grammar [A]. In A. Goldberg (ed.). Conceptual Structure, Discourse and Language [C]. Stanford: CSLI Publications, 1996. 113-129.
Fauconnier, G. & M. Turner. Conceptual Integration Networks [M]. Stanford: CSLIPublications, 1998.
Freud, S. Jokes and Their Relation to Unconscious [M]. London: Penguin Books, 1976.
Gruner, C. R. The Game of Humor: A Comprehensive Theory of Why We Laugh [M]. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1997.
Hazlitt, W. The Complete Work of William Hazilitt [M]. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987.
Heilman, E. Harry Potter’s World: Multidisciplinary Critical Perspectives [M] London: Falmer Press, 2003.
Koestler, A. The Act of Creation [M]. Westminster: Penguin Books, 1964.
Hofstadter, D. & L. Gabora. Synopsis of the workshop on humor and cognition [J]. Humor: International Journal of Humor Research, 1989, (2-4): 417-440.
McGhee, P. E. Humor, Its Origin and Development [M]. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman and Company, 1979.
Mulkay, M. On Humour: Its Nature and Its Place in Modern Society [M], Cambridge: Polity Press,1998.
Palmer, J. Taking Humour Seriously [M]. London: Routledge, 1994.
Schopenhauer, A. The World as Will and Idea [M]. NewYork: Harper & Row, 1968.
Sperber, D. & D. Wilson. Irony and the use-mention distinction [A]. In S. Davis (ed.)
Pragmatics. A Reader [C]. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991, 550–563.
Sperber, D. & D. Wilson. Relevance: Communication and Cognition [M]. Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, 2001.
Suls, J. M. A two-stage model for the appreciation of jokes and cartoons: An information-processing analysis [A]. In L. Kline (ed.) The Psychology of Humor [C]. New York: Academic Press, 1972: 81-100.
Turner, M. & G. Fauconnier. Conceptual integration and formal expression [J]. Journal of Metaphor and Symbolic Activity, 1995: 183-204.
Veatch, T. C. A theory of humor [J]. Humor: International Journal of HumorResearch, 1998: 161-215.
Whited, L. The Ivory Tower and Harry Potter: Perspectives on the Literary Phenomenon [M]. Missouri: Missouri Press, 2004.
Wilson, D. Relevance and understanding [A]. In G. Brown, et al. (eds.) Language and Understanding [C]. Shanghai: Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press, 1994. 35-58.
Wilson, D. & D. Sperber. Relevance theory [A]. In L. Horn & G. Ward (eds.) Handbook of Pragmatics [C]. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004: 607-632.
叶舒宪.巫术思维与文学的复活:《哈利·波特》现象的文化阐释[J].文艺研究, 2002a, (3); 56-62.
叶舒宪.《哈利·波特》与后现代文化寻根[J].海南广播电视大学学报, 2002b, (2): 31-35.
叶舒宪.凯尔特文化复兴思潮与《哈利·波特》[J].瞭望新闻周刊, 2002c, (1): 56-58.