A Cognitive-Pragmatic Inquiry Into English Humor With Its Application To Pedagogy

Humor, as a particularly interesting phenomenon in human life, is pervasive. It is embodied in different forms and performs different functions. Many scholars have been interested in it long ago. Study of humor can date back to the time of the great philosophers, such as Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, etc. Subsequently, literary critics began their study and more recently a multidisciplinary study is conducted from various fields, such as psychology, sociology, physiology, aesthetics, anthropology, etc. Study of humor also attracted the attention of linguists long ago. However, it is not until the late 1970s that linguists acquired a central role in research of humor. Humor is so complex, although there are abundant theories, that we find it hard to present a satisfactory definition and other aspects of humor are even more complex. The present research mainly deals with verbal humor, humorous lines and self-contained, joke-carrying text by virtue of the two main theories of cognitive-pragmatics—Relevance Theory and the Conceptual Blending Theory with some social-cultural references attempting to explore the process of humor production and appreciation and the application of humor to pedagogy..In the part of Introduction, the author intends to draw an overall picture of the present thesis. The objectives of the research, methodology and data collection and outline of the present dissertation are all expounded and established.Chapter One, is the literature review. Various definitions of humor are presented, including the definition suggested by the present author that humor is spoken/written language which is perceived to be funny or amusing, and is able to please the hearer or reader with or without the producer's intention. Then the author discusses the relation or distinctions between humor and some related concepts. The three classical theories of humor and two main linguistic theories of humor are presented. Next is a review of the previous studies of humor in pragmatics and their problems. The last part provides the reasons for the adoption of Relevance Theory in combination with the Conceptual Integration Theory.Chapter Two is devoted to the explanation of Relevance Theory and humor.