A Perspective Of Cultivating English Communicative Competence Through Linguistic Humor

With the increasingly extensive communication between China and the rest of the world, how to employ the global language, English, to conduct effective communication has become the common concern of all English learners. However, for most of them, the key problem does not just lie in how to learn grammatically correct English from textbooks, but to a greater extent in how to apply pragmatically appropriate English to their practical verbal communication. Therefore, cultivation and improvement of English communicative competence is the ultimate goal that every English lover has been longing for.Appropriately recognizing, understanding and appreciating others' English humor and applying English humor to daily communication can embody the communicator's comprehensive communicative language competence in strategically mobilizing both linguistic knowledge and extra-linguistic knowledge. However, current humor research has paid too little attention to the application of humor in practical communication. Besides, it is far from being comprehensive, for there are few single works that have made research into both the external linguistic forms of humorous utterances and the internal mental mechanism in humor production and comprehension.The present thesis involves not only the surface structural features of linguistic humor, from the perspectives of phonetics, wording, syntax, semantics and discourse respectively, but also the deep structure of linguistic humor, by making a tentative discussion about the psychological and cognitive foundations in humor production and through the combined employment of Grice's Cooperative Principle, Leech's Polite Principles and Sperber and Wilson's Relevance Theory, together with related...