A Pragmatic Approach To Humorous Utterances: Humorous Speech Acts And Strategies In Zhao Benshan's Comic Sketches

Zhao Benshan's humor enjoys vast popularity in China; nevertheless, from the literature available, it can be found that most researches on Zhao's comic sketches focus on the linguistic features and styles and few tentative studies have been conducted to account for Zhao's humor from the perspective of sociolinguistics.This thesis, through a case study of Zhao's comic sketches, attempts to study humorous speech acts within the framework of speech act theory, with the aim to interpret how verbal humor in Zhao's comic sketches is produced and find out what the most effective strategies are in the production of humor, which contributes to extending the approaches to the analysis of humorous utterances (HU) in comic sketches and conversational texts.Throughout this research, John Austin's Speech Acts Theory and Searle's development to the Speech Acts Theory are adopted to classify humorous utterances. According to Austin (1962), the humorous speech act in my corpus consists of three sub-acts:locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary. Based on Searle's revision to Austin's classification of illocutionary acts, humorous utterances in Zhao's comic sketches are classified into six categories:Declarations, Representatives, Expressives, Directives, Commissives and Other. Then in the light of Hay's study on pragmatic strategies, the effort is made to discuss the dynamic interaction between illocutionary acts and perlocutionary acts in which humor is involved in and what strategy is the most frequently used in the production of humor. And these are done with taxonomy of three categories:Solidarity, Aggression and Defense types of perlocutionary acts.The present research selects 42 cases out of 708 cases taken from 29 comic sketches of Zhao Benshan. The frequency distribution of humorous speech acts in Zhao's comic sketches shows that Expressives are the most extensively used and Declarations the least. And among the five types of illocutionary acts, Expressives are the most effective to perform perlocutions. Aggression-based strategy is the most preferred in Zhao's comic sketches.Though it is not the first time to study Zhao Benshan's comic sketches, it is the first time to analyze them with Speech Acts Theory. Thus, it is a creative try, shedding some light on the future studies of other linguistic phenomena from the perspective of Speech Acts Theory.