A Pragmatic Analysis Of Verbal Humor In The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn

Humor is a particular character of human beings and also an effective way of communication. For centuries, humor has been studied by scholars of different disciplines, which makes humor become a multi-disciplinary research object, and thereby it has become an essential component part in all cultures and languages. This is the reason why humor can affect our daily life greatly. Generally speaking, humor is classified into verbal humor and situational humor by Bergson. Based on his classification, the author of the thesis, who will endeavor to analyze humor by cooperative principle and speech act theory from the pragmatic perspective, takes verbal humor as the object of this research. All the data in this thesis are selected from the masterpiece of American humorist Mark Twain: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which is renowned for both its humorous utterances of the characters and its funny plots. The author attempts to conduct a devoted research into the humorous utterances in the novel by applying the pragmatic theories, one of the branches of modern linguistics. By analyzing verbal humor in this novel, the author intends to find out how the utterances have the humorous effects and how the laugh-causing mechanism of verbal humor is created. The findings of the research may also prove the feasibility of the appreciation of literary works from the pragmatic perspective.Furthermore, Chinese readers may be confronted with the problems of cognition when they are appreciating English verbal humor in literature because of the obstacles of cross-cultural communication. Thus another key point of the thesis is to cultivate the taste in sense and analysis of verbal humor of Chinese readers. What's more, by inducing and analyzing the information selected from the various reference materials, the author finds the fact that there are few studies which analyze the utterances of the novel from the pragmatic perspective of linguistics. Subsequently, the author has drawn the conclusion that most previous studies on The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn are mainly from the panorama of literature, not from the pragmatic perspective of linguistics. Hence, the author would like to verify the fact that there is indeed a close relationship between linguistics and literature.