A Pragmatic Approach To The Understanding Of Verbal Humor

As a language phenomenon, humor is pervasive in literature, in the movies, on televisions, etc. Humor plays important roles in our daily communication. Appropriate humor can not only produce laughter, but also help people release tension, eliminate embarrassment and survive the predicament as well. Across history, many researchers have studied and analyzed humor from different angles, such as philosophy, psychology, sociology, linguistics, etc. By contrast, linguistics is rather a newcomer and pragmatic study of verbal humor is particularly the case. Through extensive literature review, and particularly from the perspective of pragmatics, this paper illustrates the application of various pragmatic contents to interpreting the realization of humor with examples with an aim to systematically reveal the realizations of humor and the explanations to humor's realization by application of various pragmatic contents. Thus, humor can be better interpreted and used.In present study, firstly, two confused definitions, namely, humor and jokes will be distinguished. Secondly, the writer tries to explore the laughter-making mechanism. Through analysis, the writer finds that cognitive factors are also important laughter-making factors besides incongruity that has been proved to be successful to create humor. Cognitive factors include the physical environment, mutual knowledge and cognitive ability of communicators. It is useful to help us construct the laughter-making mechanisms. Thirdly, some basic pragmatic contents, such as Grice's Cooperative Principle, Austin's Speech Act Theory, Speber&Wilson's Relevance Theory , Leech's Politeness Principle, Presupposition, and one pragmatic strategy- Deliberate Misinterpretation will be used to elaborate the realization of humor. We hope that we can find more evidence in pragmatics for the production of humor. Finally, the paper explores some important pragmatic functions of verbal humor. We discuss how humor can be used to activate atmosphere, alleviate conflict, attack and counter-attack, and save one's faces. The writer hopes that the study can make its own contribution to the systematic study on humor, and that increasing people can experience the glamour of humor.