Semantic And Pragmatic Analyses Of Humor

Humor is everywhere in our daily life. Throughout the centuries, it has been studied by psychologists, physiologists and philosophers. Nowadays the study of humor has already become a special and independent discipline. With the rapid development of natural and social sciences, scholars have extended the humor studies from those above-mentioned traditional fields to such broader ones as anthropology, pedagogy, aesthetics, sociology, and many others.Since the 1950s, the world has witnessed great changes in the field of linguistics. The study of linguistics no longer stays on the stage of grammatical studies, but turns to the meaning aspect of languages. In recent years, semantics, cultural linguistics, pragmatics have arisen and developed into important branches of linguistics. The theories of semantics and pragmatics now sharpen our eye and widen our horizon in humor studies.Humor, as a kind of speech communication, can be explained with the help of semantics and pragmatics for the reason that the realization of humor especially depends on the context and the implied meaning of the language. Here appears an intersection between the humor studies and the semantic and pragmatic theories. This thesis intends to apply the basic linguistic theories to humor, especially verbal humor. With the help of sample analyses illustrating how the respective semantic and pragmatic theories exercise great explanatory force on humor, we will mainly concern ourselves with the relative linguistic theories of humor, and then further explore the relationship among the nature of humor, the theory of incongruity and the script opposition in humor texts. The following is a brief outline of what will be covered in each of the successive chapters.An introduction to the general study of humor is provided in Chapter 1, introducing the basic ideas and concepts of humor, and surveying some of its major theories.Chapter 2 reviews four major categories of linguistic theories of humor including the structuralist, the semiotic, the sociolinguistic and the script-based theories.The next two chapters are the main body of this thesis. Chapter 3 attempts, from a'surface' semantic point of view, to analyze the language phenomena which cause ambiguity, hence humor. With, sample analyses iHttstrating the application of pragmatic theories in humor, Chapter 4 examines some recent studies on humor from the aspects of Speech Act Theory, Cooperative Principle and Relevance Theory. It argues that speech act analysis can be applied to humor as well as irony; it demonstrates a series of disputes as to the Cooperative Principle of humor, and discusses their limitations and mutual relations, and points out prospectively that the script-based theories of Raskin and Attardo's are proved more effective; it also finds that the Relevance Theory offers us a reasonable theoretical framework for the inferential process of humor.Chapter 5 is a tentative theoretical conclusion of this thesis. It concludes that, either ambiguity on 'surface' semantic level or script opposition on 'deep' pragmatic level, is the representation of script opposition of script-based theories. It further explores the relationship among the nature of humor, the incongruity theory of humor, and the concept of script opposition very often mentioned in this thesis. They are virtually similar ideas from multiple perspectives: the nature of humor from philosophy, the incongruity theory of humor from cognitive psychology and the script opposition from linguistic studies of humor. Their relationship can be represented by two different concentric circles with the nature of humor as the center.To sum up, this thesis reveals the effectiveness of and draws a tentative conclusion for linguistic studies of humor from the semantic aspect, its 'surface' structure, and the pragmatic aspect, its 'deep' structure.