A Contrastive Study Of Linguistic And Cultural Differences Between English And Chinese Verbal Humor

Humor has long enjoyed popularity among the scholars of various fields all over the world. Verbal humor is a very common but special linguistic phenomenon, whose linguistic contents may vary from one to another, but are produced to bring about one universal thing: laughter. This unpredictability in form but infallibility in outcome has attracted the attention and interests of scholars in many fields. The traditional research focuses on the logic, the nature, the working mechanism of humor and the rhetoric it employs. It finds out that the logic in humor is quite different from that in serious discourses. The pragmatic research holds that humor results from the violation of the maxims of Grice's Cooperative Principle (CP). By contrast, contrastive linguistics is rather a newcomer. With an aim to obtain a more comprehensive and dynamic pragmatic understanding of the similarities and differences between Chinese and English verbal humor, and make the findings more 'pragmatic' in genuine communications, this thesis conducts a contrastive analysis study on Chinese and English verbal humor.