A Pragmatic Understanding Of Verbal Humor

This thesis attempts a qualitative linguistic exploration -- phonological, lexical, syntactical, stylistic, and especially pragmatic - into verbal humor in the communicative process, with reference to the psychological Incongruity Theory of humor. We also have a tentative work in discussing the humorous phenomena in Zen sect of Chinese Buddhism.There no unified definition about humor. There are four essential components in humor: cognitive, social, emotional and physiological. We have reviewed the major psychological theories of humor and laughter differentiated some differentiations that occur in verbal humor: humor and wit, humor created by language and humor expressed by language.Since this thesis is from a pragmatic perspective, some relevant topics of pragmatics in analyzing verbal humor have been introduced such as CP, IP, BP, to name just a few. We also have made it clear that humor is a strategic avoidance of explicitness. Thus it falls naturally into the scope of pragmatics, in which conversational implicature is a core.Among other factors, it is out of a sense of surprise that the hearer laughs or smiles at a humorist's talk. This is the Principle of Surprise, eliciting mechanisms of humor, with regard to the alternate interplay between message redundancy and entropy in both linguistic meaning and form. The descriptive Principle of Surprise works hand in hand with the explanatory Principle of Highly Interpretable and Enjoyable Incongruity. Humorous incongruities are characterized with much lower degrees of de-familiarization and with much higher interpretability, enjoyability and high human interest value.Instrumental humor is of higher value of research, which can be realized by figures of speech and deviations in the form and the meaning, in accordance with the requirements of the Principle of Surprise and the Principle of Highly Interpretable and Enjoyable Incongruity. Both form and meaning deviations are the speaker's intentional language manipulation to generate verbal incongruities. Form deviations include phonetic, phonological, lexical, and syntactical deviations and meaning deviations include semantic and pragmatic deviations.We have tentatively applied a pragmatic perspective on the research of the humorous speech events in Chan Sect of Chinese Buddhism. This kind of analysis is quite rare, which adds some significance to this thesis. At the same time, we also have discussed the special conversational stances and the special pragmatic rules in Chinese culture.Conclusion: The main ideas are summarized in this part, and the possible significance and limitation are also pointed out here.