A Study Of English Humorous Utterance From The Perspective Of Conversational Implicature

Humorous languages, especially those in the form of conversation in life, have distinctive pragmatic features. There is a close relationship between humor and pragmatics, which can be found in various books on pragmatics. In those books, humorous conversations serve as examples for pragmatic analysis. Effective humorous languages often reflect one or several pragmatic features. To review the study of this issue, there are some papers that analyze humor with pragmatic effects or humor with pragmatic features.Generally speaking, pragmatics, as a rather new field in linguistics, studies how humans interpret language and use it through contexts in communication. Pragmatics mainly concerns these matters: Deixis, Conversational Implicature, Presupposition, Speech Acts and Relevance Theory, etc. Nearly in every book of pragmatics, we can find some jokes as examples and most of them are employed to illustrate the flouting of some maxims of the Cooperative Principle. Metaphor, irony, hyperbole and some other rhetorical devices are often employed in these jokes. Suo Zhenyu, in his Pragmatics: A Course Book (2000) introduces Tact Principle. It consists of three maxims, one of which is the Maxim of Humor. He believes when we communicate with others, to be tactful, we can be humorous in some situations. In The Language of Humor (1985), Walter Nash mentions the pragmatic factor. However, it mainly refers to the Speech Act Theory. Grice is a great scholar advocating Cooperative Principle. Raskin and Attardo follow his step using the theory to explain humors. They believe the flouting of the maxims in CP will lead to humors. Their explanation and interpretation of the CP theory prove to be a proper substitute of the Gricean theory in humor communication and a plausible way of studying humor.Humor research in China began in the1980's.The research has been conducted from the cooperative principle, ambiguity and figures of speech respectively, the results of which are distributed in the academic editions. But these researches, particularly those from pragmatic perspective, remain quite superficial and scant. This paper, therefore, ventures on an attempt to analyze English humorous utteramce from pragmatic perspective in which found its insufficient study at the present time. An abundance of examples has been collected from the sitcom Friends, which provide analytical material for the pragmatic analysis. The author intends to explore humorous utterance by view of Cooperative Principle and Politeness Theory and the integration of the two. This paper lays emphasis on the Cooperative Principle, which is the core of one aspect of pragmatics—conversational implicature. Although many linguists have been doubtful of the Cooperative Principle, as it provides detailed maxims and sub-maxims, it makes the analysis of conversations rather persuasive. So comparatively speaking, it is the most effective pragmatic theory for analyzing how the humorous effects are achieved in conversational humor. Due to this, the main part of the thesis is a detailed analysis of how the theory of conversational implicature is reflected in humorous utterance. It lists various rhetorical devices and other linguistic devices employed in English humor as the deliberate flouting of the maxims of the Cooperative Principle. At the same time, the humorous effects achieved by them are studied and analyzed.The purpose of this paper is to reexamine the relationship between Cooperative Principle and humor through the analysis of the examples, in the hope that it will be of some help in the study of the language of humor and cross-cultural communication. Through the analysis, we will understand better how those humorous effects are achieved and how a short conversation brings us so much enjoyment. Consequently, we will know more about how to appreciate humor and how to create humor.The thesis consists of six parts. The first part is the introduction, which briefly touches upon the rationale and motivation of the thesis. Chapter one offers a review of humor studies at home and abroad. Chapter two is the theoretical framework of the thesis, presenting a general description of two theories: the Conversational Implicature and Politeness Theory. Chapter three is the main body of the thesis, which focuses on the case analysis of humor by view of Cooperative Principle and Politeness Theory and the integration of the two. Humor generated by flouting the Cooperative Principle will be first discussed, demonstrating the power of the Conversational Implicature in interpreting humor with examples. And then, the chapter concentrates on Politeness Theory, showing its contributions to the understanding of humor with cases. Chapter four is the implication of humor for cross-cultural communication and English teaching and learning. The last part is the conclusion of the thesis. It sums up the main findings and potential limitations of this thesis, and aspects for further study will also be suggested.