The Pragmatic Analysis Of English Humor

Looking back at the history, humorous language and behaviour had been treated as frivolous, ludicrous, and even evil. However, with the development of social civilization, people have gradually realized that humour actually is indispensable for our monotonous and regular life. Humour is embodied in operas, movies, writings, conversations, etc. And the most common type is humorous conversations.In many pragmatics books, lots of humorous conversations can be found, which are employed to analyze pragmatics. So we can see that humour and pragmatics are closely connected. However, papers about humorous language with a pragmatic view are comparatively only a few. Besides, most of them only focus on certain aspects of pragmatics, for example, cooperative principle. Based on the main parts of pragmatics, this paper does a comparatively detailed research on the humorous language in English conversations. At the beginning of the thesis, some popular definitions of humour are compared and a conclusion is made. Then humour is classified into four types and its functions in the social interaction are specified. Thereafter, main aspects of pragmatics are generally introduced, which serve as a foundation for the following analysis. In the core part of this thesis, plenty of humorous conversations are used as examples, and their pragmatic effects are analyzed one by one. In this part, conversational implicature is attached most importance to, which is also connected with some rhetorical devices, for example, irony, pun, hyperbole, metaphor, rhetorical questions and so on. Besides, this paper also discusses the relationship between cooperative principle and politeness principle, and other pragmatic characteristics such as speech act, deixis, etc.