A Pragmatic Analysis Of The Verbal Humor Elicitation Mechanism Of Total Women

Total Women is one of the popular comedic scripts composed by the famous playwright Lai Shengchuan. It became a great success when first played in Taipei in 2005. And it has drawn very large audience when it began its first tour show in the mainland China in 2007. Consisting of the prologue Total Women, Scolding on the Street, My Aunt, Practice Eloquence, Life Journey, Quick Weight, Romantic Disease, Women's Secret and the epilogue, it was set in a commercial "Client, thank you" party titled "Total Woman's Night" held by a company specializing female products to acknowledge its patronizers in the past one year. Various humorous opinions on female's mental state are expressed through the humorous conversation among Annie, Betty and Fannie. In the final analysis, it is no other than the charm of the humor of the script that brings the play great success.Long since ancient times, humor has attracted scholars'attention and has been researched in various fields such as philosophy, psychology, cognitive science and linguistics, the findings of which help us have a better understanding of the essence of humor. However, previous studies are not without problems. Firstly, the study on verbal humor in linguistics, though relatively less advanced than that in other fields, has not drawn enough attention to the findings in these areas. Secondly, most previous pragmatic study on verbal humor mainly collected and analyzed verbal humors of the same type from different origin rather than focused on verbal humors of different types from the same discourse such as a script. Last but not the least, different cases of verbal humor in the same discourse are elicited by different pragmatic motives, to which few previous studies have paid enough attention. Grounded on the above consideration, this study examines the elicitation mechanism of different cases of verbal humor in the same script Total Women from the multi-angle perspective of pragmatics, comparing the analysis with Incongruity-resolution theory and aiming at finding corresponding pragmatic motives for different cases of verbal humor.Chapter One is an introduction, revealing the rationale, objective and the layout of the study.Chapter Two is literature review where the definition and categorization of humor, the overview of the script and the status in quo studies on verbal humor in psychological, cognitive and linguistic domains respectively. Chapter Three is the core of the study, examining thoroughly the pragmatic motives for the verbal humor elicitation of the script under the guidance of pragmatic presupposition, cooperative principle, Relevance Theory and Adaptation Theory.Chapter Four is discussion. Contrast of Incongruity-resolution theory and pragmatic analysis of verbal humor elicitation of Total Women is expected there and a multi-dimensional verbal humor elicitation mechanism is to be offered in this chapter.Chapter Five is conclusions. The conclusions, limitation of the study and suggestions for further study is given.