A Tentative Study On The Humor Of Huang Hong's Short Comedies From The Perspective Of Pragmatic Presupposition

It is well known that short comedies are always expected to create humorous atmosphere. What is the mechanism triggering its humor? To settle this problem, many a linguist has had a large number of studies on it and they have proposed the theory of conversational implicature and the relevance theory to give a satisfactory explanation for this problem. In addition, some other linguists once mentioned that the approach of presupposition is also a way of expounding humorous cases which cannot be wrested with by conversational implicature theory and relevance theory, and they didn't have elaborate studies on this approach. So, on the basis of the previous studies, this thesis will aim at analyzing the humorous cases from the angle of pragmatic presupposition to find out its triggering mechanism. Meanwhile, it will focus on searching out its linguistic factors and non-linguistic factors leading to the cancellation of pragmatic presupposition.Pragmatic presupposition is closely related to the speaker, the context, the background information and the common knowledge, and it is highly sensitive to the shift of context and that of the shared knowledge. In other words, if an utterance is put in a certain specific context in which the context contradicts the presupposition, the shift of context leads to contradiction to previous context, or the utterance is not in line with background knowledge or common knowledge, its presupposition will be abandoned accordingly. It is just its sensitivity to context that endows pragmatic presupposition with the property of cancellation. And this cancellation property leads to a contradiction between the following utterance and the presumptions made by the audiences from previous utterances. In this way, it finally reaches unexpected results and makes the utterance sound humorous.There are a great many factors resulting in the cancellation of pragmatic presuppositions. Based on the study of a large collection of cases selected from Hang Hong's short comedies, this thesis proves that the humor of short comedies is originated from cancellation property of pragmatic presupposition; furthermore, it also finds out the factors resulting in the cancellation of pragmatic presupposition, which are linguistic factor including intra-sentential context, discourse context and construction of reductio arguments and the non-linguistic factors including common knowledge, background knowledge and body language.