The Exploration Into Chinese And English Verbal Humor From Cultural And Pragmatic Perspective

As far as humor is concerned, Lin Yutang's statement is of great significance: humor is a state of mind, a point of view and a way of looking at life. As a means of interpersonal communication and a common form of art, humor has penetrated every aspects of social life. Humor is not only a linguistic concept, but also a cultural phenomenon; humor is not only a special form of language, it also connotes large amount of cultural information. As we all know, both Chinese and English humor have long history and cultural accumulation. In Chinese and English humor, we can know of the unique connotation of Chinese and western cultures.Though humor is very important in our social life, among so many academic researches, researchers always pay little attention to the study on humor. Traditional researches of humor mainly focus on physiology, rhetoric, and philosophy. With the progress of human society and the development of natural science and social science, the range of the study on humor has extended to humanism, education, aesthetics and sociology. Since 1950s, linguistic theories, especially theories of pragmatics, have developed very quickly and made some great breakthrough, thus providing researches of humor with a wider vision and a newer perspective. Comparing the Chinese and English studies on humor, it's not difficult for us to find that western theories of humor are very mature and systematic. Besides three traditional theories: Superiority Theory, Release Theory and Incongruity Theory, there are some other theories, such as Semantic Script Theory of Humor established by Raskin and Five Parameters of Jokes stated by Attardo. In recent years, many linguists apply the Grice's Cooperative Principles and Sperber & Wilson's Relevance Theory to the analysis of humor. In Chinese researches of humor, we can see that even though Lin Yutang and Lu Xun have stated their own opinion on humor, we have to admit that there are few systematic theories of humor in China. So many Chinese researches of humor are based on western theories. At present, no matter in China or in other countries, there are many humor researches. These researches only reveal the common points of human communication from the cognitive perspective, and pay little attention to the social cultural difference that influence the human's cognition. Now it is still very weak in the research of humor from the perspective of culture. Firstly, the thesis briefly reviews the definitions of humor in Chinese and English culture, the history and the development of Chinese and English humor and the Chinese and western theories of humor. For the comprehension of humor is closely related to the context, the thesis also clarifies the classification of context and introduces the relationship between humor and context. Then with the perspective of pragmatics, the thesis analyzes Chinese and English jokes with the Cooperative Principle and Relevant Theory. From the pragmatic studies on humor, the thesis points out the limitation of the CP and RT applied to the comprehension of humor. It must be pointed out that the root of linguistic differences in Chinese and English humor is the cultural differences in Chinese and English culture. So lastly the thesis probes into the root of the differences in Chinese and English culture in terms of belief in religion, history, geography and social system; through the analysis of Chinese and English humor, it reveals the different cultural patterns in Chinese and English culture, such as patterns of thought and social values; these cultural differences decide the different topics and targets of Chinese and English humor.The large amount of jokes in the thesis is all collected from books, magazines and the Internet. At first, we use the interpretative approach to analyze the jokes; then we use comparative approach to compare the cultural differences in Chinese and English humor. For there are many different dialects in different areas of China, the thesis confines its samples in contemporary Chinese based on the Beijing dialect. Similarly, the languages and cultures are quite different in different English-speaking countries, so the thesis mainly focuses on the standard American and British humor and American and British cultures.Different cultures decide the differences in the production and the ways of expression in Chinese and English humor. In this point, humor is an important component of culture, and it can fully reflect the features of culture. To a large degree, only when the hearer understand its cultural connotation enough, can humorous utterance itself be much more meaningful, so is language itself. For language learners, language is not only the symbols and rules, but also the keystone of culture. Learning another language, we cannot only learn words, sentences and grammar rules. Only when we learn the culture of the language at the same time, can we use the language more fluently. As language teachers, we must sense the importance of the cultural education in foreign language teaching in class. It also needs us to continually explore and study how to integrate the cultural awareness into the whole process of foreign language teaching. When we teach cultural knowledge in class, the appreciation of humor is an effective and relaxed way that makes the language learners appreciate the humor deeply with understanding smile.