A Study Of Humor’s Production Based On The Pragmatic Presupposition Theory

Humor is a common phenomenon in human society and meanwhile it is an effectiveway to achieve the communication. It exists everywhere in human life and plays an importantrole in human development. Therefore the researches on humor undergo hundreds of years,the earliest study was in the field of philosophy and psychology, and recently it entered intothe linguistics and was studied from the aspect of pragmatics.The theories underlying the humor are becoming more and more mature, at the sametime the humorous materials are also various, such as the urban comedies, series of cross-talkperformances, comedies and so on. This thesis will use the performance of Jeff Dunham asthe corpus and aims to find out the factors that lead to achieve the humors. Theventriloquism is a special art, which is very popular today. When there is a performance,people are all crowed into the theatres and enjoy the performance, which helps people to easethe stresses. Thus the humor analysis of this art style is meaningful. Meanwhile, it is helpfulfor people in appreciating the foreign cultures so as to promote the communications betweentwo countries and their peoples.In recent years, the presupposition theory is frequently employed to study theproduction of humor. These studies are mainly focused on the false presupposition, cultural presupposition, presupposition- triggers, and the cancellation of the presupposition and so on.The author of this paper is inclined to the comprehensive description. She tries to explain thehumor through the presupposition’s classifications. First of all, she figures out the humorbelonging to which type of the presupposition. And then combining with the causes andcharacters of such presupposition to explain concretely how humor generates. Finally sheconnects the analysis of the existing examples to the presupposition’s characteristics andmakes a further analysis to figure out how the cases make use of the properties or violate themto promote the generation of humor. The cancellation of the presupposition should be paidmore attentions to because it is special and has its own system. Therefore the author uses oneseparate segment to illustrate the humors’production of this kind.By extracting and analyzing the presupposition phenomenon involved in theconversations of ventriloquism performance, the author exemplifies thepresupposition-mechanism in humor’s generation. Then she conducts the conclusion that thepragmatic presupposition can promote the production of verbal humor and indicates itsimportance. The paper uses the theoretical analysis together with the examples’explorationand by means of various methods, such as induction, deduction and comprehensive analysis,processes the qualitative research.Although the thesis is not perfect, it is concrete and comprehensive.