A Pragmatic Analysis Of Humorous Language

Humor is a form of communication highly regarded in our society. It is any act of communication which is perceived by any of the interacting parties as humorous and leads to laughing, smiling, or a feeling of amusement. As a language phenomenon, humor plays an important role in many spheres and aspects of human life. In daily communication, humor improves human relations as well as the communicative atmosphere, and also is endowed with the symbol of personal wit, glamour and education. Humorous language or verbal humor is a very common but special linguistic phenomenon, whose linguistic contents may vary from one to another, but are produced to bring about one universal thing: laughter. This unpredictability in form but infallibility in outcome has attracted the attention and interests of scholars in many fields for its mechanism and functions. Throughout the centuries, humor has been studied by psychologists, physiologists and philosophers. With the rapid development of natural and social sciences, scholars have extended the humor studies from those above-mentioned traditional fields to such broader ones as anthropology, pedagogy, aesthetics, sociology, and many others.Humor is a usual phenomenon in human communication, however, in everyday verbal communication, it is easy to enjoy but hard to define humorous utterances. Firstly, this thesis gives a general introduction to humor, including its definition and classification. Secondly, it reviews and discusses the historical and academic background of humor studies, especially the three conventional theories: Superiority Theory, Relief Theory and Incongruity Theory; and the two main linguistic theories of humor: Semantic Script Theory of Humor and General Theory of Verbal Humor. Thirdly, based on the search results of the previous studies about traditional humor theories, this thesis intends to employ, from the angle of pragmatics, theories like Speech Act Theory, Cooperative Principle, Relevance Theory and Politeness Principle to analyze the realization of humor in many specific examples. Here appears an intersection between the humor studies and the pragmatic theories. With the help of sample analyses, this thesis conducts a pragmatic study on verbal humor with an aim to obtain a more comprehensive and dynamic pragmatic understanding of verbal humor, and make the findings more"pragmatic"in genuine communications. Fourthly, the thesis points out the ability of utilizing humor can be regarded as part of communicative competence in our daily life. Further more, it also suggests putting this research result to practical English teaching in China. At last, this thesis sums up the insights gained from the analysis in the previous parts, and of course, the limitations of the study and some suggestions for future research are also covered in the end.