The Pragmatic Analysis Of Humor In Mark Twain’s Representative Short Stories

Humor is an essential part of everyday communication and an importantcomponent of innumerable literary works and films and of art in general. It is rooted ina specific cultural and linguistic context, but it is also an indispensable part ofintercultural communication and mass entertainment. There are about over200theoriesfrom different disciplines about the final incentive of humor, most of which are from thedisciplines of psychology, philosophy, sociology, linguistics and so on. In the field oflinguistics, many scholars did research from the domains of semantics, pragmatics,rhetoric, cognitive linguistics, and sociolinguistics. In the pragmatics theories employedto explore humorous languages, the following theories were used most: cooperativeprinciple from Grice and the relevance theory from Sperber and Wilson.Mark Twain, a mastermind of humor and realism, is seen as a giant in worldliterature. William Faulkner called Mark Twain “the father of American literature”. Thisthesis analyzes the humor occurring in his representative short stories in terms ofcooperative principle and relevance theory from pragmatic angle. Based on this analysis,this thesis then probes into the unique humor of Mark Twain both through numerousexamples generated by violation of four maxims of CP and in the light of relevancetheory. The incongruity mechanism between maximal relevance and optimal relevancecreates humor in Mark Twain’s short stories.In this way, a sufficient inquiry of Mark Twain’s humor in his short stories can beachieved. And then the result can guide the reader to have a better understanding ofMark Twain and his works, and it can also guide readers to appreciate works of MarkTwain from pragmatic angle.