【正文】 4 Development of Chinese Humor The period of Wei and Jin Dynasty was said to the second blooming period of Chinese humor. Forests of Jokes, was the first collection of jokes in China because this book is intented to satirize the society by applying exaggeration, humor and jests. Ming and Qing Dynasties was an another blossom for Chinese humor. Apart from play, humor was used in many other kinds of literary works, such as short stories, prose, poem, etc. [4] For a long time, the develop the humor means very much to Chinese people, and theory on humor is ignored. From 1980s, not only the humor in China began to develop fleetly. The study and theory of humor bees more diverse and goes deep into various fields and absorbs some foreign theories. Chinese scholars not only studying Chinese humor, but learning humor in other languages. 4 Linguistic Formationmechanism of Humor in English and Chinese Humor is everywhere. It is just like the seasoning in our food, making our conversation and life interesting, joyful and colorful. Palmer saids, a mechanism of humor may be concluded as follows: 1) knowledge that the occasion is ?entertainment? which would act both as a humor stimulus and a brake on the sense of threat. (Here, the audience should be alert to the linguistic and paralinguistic form of the utterance which would signal the intention to joke.) 2) The incongruity is itself sufficiently acute to cause arousal but insufficiently acute to provide a threat. 3) Locating the ic meaning reveals retrospectively that the incongruity was not threatening. Verbal humor is achieved mainly through language. People may use the rich variations of language elements to elicit humorous effect. In this chapter, through the analysis of some mon types of humor, the author tries to discover what makes a joke or humorous story funny from various linguistic aspects such as syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. 4. 1 Humor es from divergence If a language form (word, phrase or sentence) can be more than one way explained reasonably, then we call this language divergence language. Many linguists argue that divergence is a universal phenomenon of linguistics, which exists both in linguistic units, including word, phrase and sentence, and in the practical application of language. On the one hand, divergence can resulting in misunderstanding。 on the other hand, it is also conducive to the formation of verbal humor. Divergence is one of the important sources of humor, and is often used as a means of producing humor in life. In addition, divergence humor is actually a misunderstanding or a conflict from different meanings. It may sometimes contain double or multiple meanings, in the wrong way or in an uncoordinated way to understand the differences in sound or gestures and the conflicts of different meanings. 4. 2 Humor Produced by Rhetoric Western Rhetoric Encyclopedia thought that rhetoric is one of the three original liberal arts in Western culture. In the long history, rhetoric has changed from time to time. Today, rhetoric is defined as the art of persuasion. In other words， Rhetoric is an art of writing and speaking, and it can persuade people. And rhetoric is sometimes a means of covering the truth. 4. 3 Humor and Pragmatics In the previous sections, scholars and experts studied humor from different points of view. Then this section will examine mainly from the aspects of pragmatics. 4. 4 Linguistic Features of English and Chinese There are all kinds of languages in our world. Some are similar to each other while others are quite different from each other. English and Chinese belongs to varied language families, and they are distinct in many aspects. Chinese characters is differ from the letters. Chinese characters are a kind of regular writing, which is based on those who can express the meaning of the stroke, and this sound, meaning and format can be synthesized into an anic whole. The English has the nature of the phoneme language system, with tha aim to express the sound, but not the meaning. China39。s thinking mode emphasizes the characteristics of Chinese characters. Westerners? thinking stresses abstractness. In the Chinese expression, the structure of certain sentences may not be plete. The function of verb is not so prominent. The center of an utterance is noun instead of verbs. If the meaning is clear, subjects and other elements can often be omitted. Sometimes the sentence even may have not beginning and no ending. While English focuses on the pleteness and pactness of the sentence. In English, the verb is the key, and the expression of the ponents can39。t be omitted. For pleteness, at times, a logic subject must be added. Chinese is hypotactic and English is paratactic. The difference of the sentence structure between English and Chinese can be found in the English version and Chinese verses. From the angle of morphology, language can be devided into inflectional language and noninflectional language. The former called marked language, the latter is nonmarked language. Verb has different forms, such as the past form and the past participle. ?went? is the past form of the verb ?go? and ?gone? is the past participle. In different tenses, we should choose different forms, otherwise the sentence is wrong. 5 Different Cultural Factors in English and Chinese Humor As is discussed in above chapter, English humor is differ form Chinese humor in many aspects. And we also learn from Chapter One that the incongruity theories play an important role in analyzing different humors. An expectancy is established when a humor begins. When the ending turns out to go beyond expectation, a sense of surprise or incongruity will arise. To resolve this incongruity, we must be able to understand the gap of cognitive and then applying its experience and knowledge to ourselves, which is called knowledgesharing. For foreigners, this “shared knowledge” mainly concerns his cognition of another culture. So, to overe the barriers of culture, this chapter focuses on the analysis the factors that can contribute to understanding differences in English and Chinese humor of cultural Cultural diversity,