What are the linguistic features of cold jokes?

Pragmatic Analysis of China's Cold Jokes

In recent years, a new language phenomenon-cold jokes has become popular on the Internet. Cold jokes are the linguistic reflection of postmodernism. Starting from the relationship between cold jokes and humor, this paper makes a simple definition of cold jokes-cold jokes are different from humor and have their own characteristics. On this basis, they are classified according to different laughing mechanisms, and try to interpret the laughing mode of cold jokes.

Pragmatic features of humor

Whether a cold joke belongs to humor, we should study the attributes of humor and see what characteristics humor has and what pragmatic effect it achieves.

As for humor, Ci Hai is defined as follows: "... usually through humor, pun, satire, homophonic, exaggeration and other means, shortcomings and advantages, defects and perfection, absurdity and rationality, stupidity and vigilance are quietly integrated." In this unity of opposites, we can see profound significance or self-deprecating wisdom. " ( 1999: 952)

In other words, the core of humor is absurd, illogical or contrary to expectations to some extent. From the pragmatic point of view, it often leads to the deviation between the listener's initial understanding and the speaker's intention, and the charm of humor is contained in it.

Judging from the speaker's intention, humor is to entertain the listener, make the listener feel funny, and then laugh, make the speaker active or attract attention.

Characteristics of cold jokes

Compared with humor, cold jokes have their own characteristics, which reflect the difference from internal contradictions to intentions.

Semantic Rhetoric Features of Cold Jokes

Before discussing the characteristics of cold jokes, let's take a look at the following cold jokes.

One day, there was a fudge walking in the street. As she was walking, she suddenly said, "Oh, dear! My legs are so soft! "

From the conventional point of view, such words are obviously ridiculous, which is obviously different from sincere words based on daily information exchange. From the perspective of rhetoric, most cold jokes only use personification, some mainly use homophonic rhetoric, and some are ordinary narrative language, while a considerable part of humor relies on the use of rhetoric to achieve the purpose of creating semantic conflicts. In addition, the cold jokes did not produce strong semantic conflict, which shows that semantic conflict is not a means to make people laugh, nor is it a deliberate effect. So how do cold jokes make laughter? In the third point, we will discuss its laughing mode.