A Pragmatic Study Of Conversational Humor

Humor plays an important role in our daily life. In daily communication, humor improves personal relationships as well as the communicative atmosphere and it is endowed with the symbol of personal wit, glamour and education. Humor is a very common but special linguistic phenomenon, whose contents may vary from one to anther. However, humor has a universal thing: laughter. Disciplines like philosophy, aesthetics, psychology, physiology, sociology, etc. have placed a long term focus and accumulated many fruitful findings on the study of humor in their respective fields. By contrast, linguistics is rather a newcomer and pragmatic study of humor is particular the case. However, the flourishing of pragmatics as the study of language in use during the past twenty years has proved its own value in a wide range of linguistic subjects.This thesis conducts a pragmatic study of conversational humor with an aim to obtain a more comprehensive and dynamic pragmatic understanding of it, and make the findings more practical in real communications. To review the study of this issue, there are many papers that tend to analyze humor with pragmatic effects or humor with pragmatic characteristics. However, these analyses mainly focus on the flouting/violating of certain maxims of the CP in humor. They also mention some rhetorical devices employed in humor, which are mainly confined to some very common ones: irony, hyperbole and pun. What's more, the limited analyses in these papers are often overlapped.On the base of former research fruit of humor, the author attempts to apply the theory of conversational implicature to the analysis of the production of the conversational humor. Firstly, the thesis gives an introduction to humor, including the objective of the thesis, methodology, data sources and the layout of the thesis. Secondly, there is a literature review, including an etymology study of humor, definition and classification of humor, the differences between humor and joke, a brief description of the previous studies of humor as well as the theories of humor. It is necessary and scientific to analyze humor especially conversational humor from the pragmatic view. Part three is the theoretical framework, introducing the theory of conversational implicature, the cooperative principle and its maxims as well as five ways of non-observance of the maxims of the CP. It lays emphasis on the CP, which is the core of the theory of conversational implicature. Although at present many linguists have been doubtful of the CP,it provides detailed maxims and sub-maxims, which makes the analysis of conversations more persuasive. So comparatively speaking, it is the most effective pragmatic theory for analyzing how the humorous effects are achieved in conversational humor. The main part of the thesis is a detailed study of how the theory of conversational implicature is reflected in conversational humor, especially intentional non-observance of the maxims of the CP in conversational humor. It lists various rhetorical devices and other linguistic devices employed in conversational humor as intentional non-observance of the maxims of the CP. At the same time, the humorous effects achieved by them are studied. Based on the above analyses, then there is a summary of the functions of conversational humor: informative function, laughter-making function and expressive function. Finally,there is a conclusion. It sums up the analysis, points out the limitations of this study and gives suggestions for future research: the speaker in the conversational humor follows the CP on the whole, but he or she does not observe all its maxims all the time, so intentional non-observance some of the maxims of the CP, which includes flouting, violating, opting out and suspending, can produce humor, while infringing only can lead to joke or something else.As an improvement of the limited analyses in the past, there is a detailed analysis of the production of conversational humor from the aspect of the non-observance of the maxims of the CP which includes five types: flouting, violating, opting out, infringing and suspending as well as their effects in conversational humor.