Pragmatic Functions Of Verbal Humor

Humor is everywhere in our daily life. The study of humor is related to psychology, rhetoric, philosophy, pedagogy, aesthetics, sociology and many others. In recent years, with the upsurge of fundamental subjects such as semantics, pragmatics and cultural linguistics, especially with well-developed pragmatics, we can make researches into humor with rich knowledge in the broader range.In this thesis, on the base of former research fruit of humor, the author attempts to apply pragmatic theories to the analysis of the functions of verbal humor. The thesis consists of five chapters.Chapter one offers an overview of humor, its definition and classification, three classical theories of humor, its nature and former research fruit of humor in the field of pragmatics.Chapter two focuses on the techniques of humor. From the semantic perspective, humor is mainly based on ambiguity. This is only a static analysis. From the pragmatic perspective, we find that humor's realization greatly depends on context. Humor can be generated by misunderstanding, twisting or suspensing the context. This is a dynamic study of verbal humor.Chapter three studies the laughter-eliciting function of verbal humor. Cooperative Principle and Relevance Theory can offer us a reasonable theoretical framework in analyzing the laughter-eliciting function. Our examinations reveal that humorous laughter could be elicited by deviating from the maxims of Cooperative Principle. According to Relevance Theory, every aspect of communication is governed by relevance principle. However, in verbal humor, in order to achieve the intended humorous effects, the speaker is not always expected to give the most relevant possible information;as a result, the context envisaged by the speaker and the one actually used by the hearer do not agree with each other. A search for a more relevant interpretation worth being processed may be activated on the part of hearer, despite the supplementary processing effort. In the comprehension of verbal humor the extraprocessing efforts invested are to be offset by additional humorous effects, by which the hearer will be amused.Chapter four focuses on the coping function of verbal humor. Anxiety and conflict exist at any time in daily life and humor can serve as a tool to deal with the source of problem. By using samples, this chapter tries to explain how humor can be used to activate atmosphere, alleviate conflict, escape hard situation, attack or counter-attack.Chapter five is attempted to discuss and analysis how verbal humor can be used as a tool to maintain solidarity. As a form of communication, humor is integrally related to a certain intention and effect. Speech Act Theory offers an effective theoretical framework for the functional analysis of language. According to Austin each speech act consists of three sub-actions — locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary. According to sample analysis we find that humorous speech acts complete general illocutionary acts while practicing the act of amusing. This chapter also discussed how solidarity, which is at the perlocutionary level of verbal humor, is achieved while the speaker is performing different humorous speech acts.Chapter six is a brief summary of the whole thesis, pointing out its achievements and the future work to be done.