Cultural Context And Verbal Humor Understanding

This thesis aims to explore the effect of cultural context on verbal humor understanding. In this study, the author adopts literature review and logical deductive methods to explore the role of cultural context in verbal humor understanding. A lot of verbal humor illustrations are chosen from papers, books and Internets to explain the effect of cultural context on verbal humor understanding and the relations between these two terms.On the basis of pragmatic theory and from four important aspects of the cultural context, which includes history, religion, social conventions and value systems, the research discusses the relations between cultural context and verbal humor understanding. In this thesis, the model of Relevance theory and the Presupposition theory are used as the theoretical bases.Results of this study show that cultural context has two important functions in verbal humor understanding: one is the restrictive function, which means the information of culture will affect and restrict the humor understanding. Only if you have the related background information, you can understand the humor. In terms of this function, three aspects are concerned: situation restriction, content restriction and cultural restriction. The other is the interpretative function. It means the cultural context can help interpret the implied meanings of humor which can make us understand the humor better. As to this function, three subdivisions are discussed: eliminating ambiguity, removing vagueness and inferring the implied meaning. It is hoped that the study will help to interpret the relations of these two terms and clarify the functions of cultural context to verbal humor understanding, which is very important for language learners' studies and future researches.