A Cognitive-Pragmatic Analysis Of Verbal Humor

Humor, pervasive in our daily life, is a perpetual phenomenon. It not only can make our life vivid and interesting, but to some extent show human beings'intelligence and creativity. We can imagine how our life would be if there were no humor! Obviously, it would be dull and gloomy. More than bringing amusement to the life of human being, humor can help people do various activities and achieve special communicative intentions. There are so many theories concerned humor researches that they can range from traditional fields as psychology, physiology and philosophy to contemporary fields as linguistics and sociology. With the great developments of linguistic theories, cognitive linguistics now provides new perspectives on humor studies. Since humor can be embodied into various forms, this thesis will concentrate on verbal humor studies.Cognitive linguists hold the view that language comprehension is a dynamic process, which sheds new blood to verbal humor studies. Some important construal means proposed by cognitive linguists have contributed a lot to demonstrate the dynamic processes of language comprehension. The thesis attempts to analyze verbal humor in light of theories of cognitive linguistics, especially in light of the Conceptual Blending Theory and the Relevance Theory, with an effort to demonstrate the way of verbal humor production, cognitive processes involved in achieving humorous effect, and verbal humor interpretation in communication.Since verbal humor comprehension is a complex process, no single theory can explain it once for ever so it's necessary for us to make new developments in order to perfect our studies. In this thesis, the author has also introduced some new achievements which endeavor to combine these two to decipher verbal humor comprehension.Meanwhile, some previous theories are introduced and adopted here to aid this explanation. An abundance of joke examples has been collected from humorous quotations, literature, works of humor and comedy, and magazines, which provide analytical material for the analysis in this thesis.This is a tentative exploration on verbal humor analysis. Further exploration needs to be carried out to perfect humor researches and facilitate its usage in communication.