A Pragmatic Study Of Verbal Humor

Verbal humor is a pervasive phenomenon in our daily life which has roused the interest of many scholars. The previous studies mainly focus on the rhetoric devices and semantic features of humor. When the pragmatic factor is involved, it usually refers to only one aspect of the pragmatics, such as violation of the Cooperative Principle.The present thesis is a tentative exploration of the generation, interpretation and application of humor within the pragmatic framework. In the analysis of humor, it tries to combine the three most prominent principles (CP, RT and PP) in the field of pragmatics to strengthen the explanatory power. By doing this the contents of the three principles can be made more specific and the understanding of humor can be more comprehensive.The first chapter is the introduction, in which the author states the main contents, the objectives and structure of the thesis.The second chapter is the literature review. In this part the author reviews the traditional humor theories and accomplishments of previous studies, then points out the inheritance and developments in the current thesis.The third chapter provides a relevance-theoretical account of the mechanism of humor. The focus is on how humorous effect is created and perceived based on the principle of maximal relevance and optimal relevance. In this process the role of context is emphasized. During the analysis of many data, humor is classified...