Approaching Gender In Pragmatic Functions Of Humor

Gender identity is one of the most elementary identities of human beings, and it is an important basis of individuals to realize themselves and recognize others. Discourse, as an important instrument of people's social practice, is also the instrument of constructing the subject's gender identities.With the analysis of the pragmatic functions of humorous discourses among a particular social group, the paper aims to explore the features of the humorous discursive gender construction in Chinese society, and it gives reasonable explanations to the phenomenon of the construction associated with the unique Chinese social, cultural and psychological factors. Because the study of the process of gender construction in China is still at its stage of theory introduction or the beginning stage, and the introduced theories have already been applied to the study the gendered discourse of the middle class social groups in western countries, the author expects that this paper, as a new viewpoint and experiment to the research of gender research with the pragmatic functions of humorous discourse, can play a positive role in the research of the theory and practice in this field.The study of the gender construction in pragmatic functions in the thesis is mainly about the analysis of the humorous discourse of the particular social group of university students, and all the material are strictly transcribed from the collected records of the real daily talks of three sex compositions.The methodology is a combination of quantitative and qualitative method. The produced data are categorized with the framework of three functions: solidarity-based, power-based and psychological function, and analyzed quantitatively with the aid of Chi-square test of SPSS, probability statistics and odds ratio. When significant tendencies are identified, they would be interpreted qualitatively in sociolinguistic and pragmatic point of view.The results show in the thesis: The significant differences do exist between male and female with the pragmatic functions of humorous discourse. Particularly female tend to use solidarity-based function of humor more than male, instead men tend to use power-based function of humor more than female. Nevertheless, psychological function of humor is not significant with the Chi-square test in the paper.The paper draws the following conclusion: There are differences between male and female in the use of humorous discourse, female students construct femininity with their intimacy, cooperation and solidarity; while male students construct their masculinity with competition, aggressiveness and challenge. Furthermore, femininity is reflected with more sharing and intimate relationship with others, while masculinity is reflected with more teasing and even fostering conflicts with others. Anyway they are constructing their own gender subjectively and objectively. As the young, well-educated and open-minded college students, they still hold an unequal gender ideology.