A Pragmatic Analysis Of English Humor

Humor, specific to human beings, is the seasoning of our daily life and an indispensable part of human speech. It not only plays an important role in the improvement of the interpersonal relationships in social activities of many kinds, but also becomes the symbol of personal wit, glamour and education. For a long time, humor has attracted the attention and interest of scholars in many fields. The researches can range from traditional fields such as psychology, physiology and philosophy to broader ones such as anthropology, pedagogy, aesthetics, sociology, etc. With the rapid development of linguistics, pragmatics provides a new perspective for humor studies.However, the researches made on the humorous language from a pragmatic point of view are comparatively limited in sum. Besides, the majority of them just apply one of pragmatic theories to the humor studies, for example, cooperative principle. Based on the seven main-stream pragmatic theories, this thesis makes a comparatively all-round research on the verbal humors occurring in English conversations.Through the analysis of lots of examples of English humor within the framework of pragmatic theories formed by cooperative principle, politeness principle, face theory, relevance theory, deixis, presupposition and speech act theories, this thesis is much devoted to the exploration of the pragmatic apparatuses for humor production and interpretation. It is found that humorous effects might be produced when CP or PP maxims are violated, when the speaker's or hearer's face should be protected, when the rule of deictic egocentricity is violated and deictic projection emerges, when the presupposition is cancelled, or when speech act is misunderstood. Relevance theory, on the other hand, provides a useful apparatus for the interpretation of some English humors.Verbal humor can serve people's psychological, emotional, social and communicative needs. A good understanding of the meaning and working mechanism of humors will contribute to the effective foreign language teaching. In addition, it helps a lot in the social and interpersonal communication.