A Pragmatic Approach To The Understanding Of Verbal Humor

As a language phenomenon, humor is pervasive in literature, in the movies, on televisions, in our life, etc. Humor plays an important role in Chinese and American culture. In daily communication, humor ameliorates human relations, improves the communicative atmosphere, but also is endowed with the symbol of personal wit, glamour and education. Therefore, more and more scholars in all kinds of the fields are paying a good deal of attention to its nature. This paper aims at analyzing one main category of verbal humor from a pragmatic perspective, hoping to find some pragmatic guidelines that direct humor production and understanding. The research method is to apply some of the major pragmatic theories, namely, Grice's Cooperative Principle, Austin and Searle's Speech Act Theory, Sperber and Wilson's Relevance Theory and Leech and Levinson's Politeness Principle to the analysis of what factors have an influence on the understanding of verbal humor. This paper adopts a quantitative approach. Data are collected through Questionnaires distributed among altogether 180 people with different genders, different ages, different educational backgrounds and different occupations from different cultural backgrounds.The paper has been divided into five chapters. Chapters one and two serve as a general survey of humor and pragmatic theories related to humor at home and abroad, and describe the research aims and factors which affect the interpretation or understanding of verbal humor from pragmatic perspective. Chapter three is to focus on research methodology and data collection through questionnaires. In Chapters four and five, detailed analysis and conclusion are made. The results show that when people interpret humor utterances, age, gender, education background, occupation background, nationality, language and other cultural background all affect the subjects' understanding of verbal humor. Besides, context has great influence on the understanding of humor utterances. Verbal humor can be characterized as incongruity in humorous rhetorical devices such as metaphor, irony, and pun. In general, western people are more humorous than Chinese people. Some people have more humoroussense. The paper mainly explores to what degree and why individual varieties, social varieties and cultural varieties all influence the understanding of verbal humor from pragmatic approach. The originality of this paper lies in a pioneering attempt to present an integrate model for the understanding of verbal humor from audiences' perspective. It also offers suggestions on proper application of daily humor communication through the deduction and inference.This paper might be of some help to further the theoretical researches in literature in the understanding of verbal humor, as well as to test the hypotheses drawn from the interpretation of humor language in daily communications. It is a pity that the subjects have not included as many individual varieties as possible and it is also hoped that this study of how the audiences affect the understanding of humor language can be furthered in other languages besides English and Chinese.