Interpretation Of English Humorous Utterances From The Perspective Of Cultural Presuppositions

The Academy Awards is widely popular with audience around the world, in which humour is itsmost typical and obvious characteristics. And the humourous facial expression and body language inthe Academy Awards are easy to understand, however, many humorous utterances covering culturalpresuppositions are difficult for non-native audiences to interpret even with subtitle provided.Because people from different cultural backgrounds would have different interpretation of thecultural presuppositions, and sometimes the information that could be understood withoutexplanation by the natives would make the foreigners confused. Therefore, this thesis sets out to geta further study on the reasons that result in the difficult interpretation of humourous culturalpresuppositions for non-native speakers. Based on the previous studies and the collected data, after aquantitative and descriptive analysis, this thesis focuses on the study of humourous utterances duringthe Academy Awards with the theoretical framework about humour and cultural presuppositions, andthere are three main findings:①verbal humour is more difficult to understand than situationalhumour;②there are many factors that are involved in the cultural presuppositions resulting inunderstanding barriers such as political factor, religious factor, social factor. And the social factorcovers a huge amount;③besides the cultural factors, four characteristics of cultural presuppositionsalso play an essential role in the interpretation process, and mutual knowledge is the key pointamong the other three characteristics—felicity condition, diachronic characteristics, uncertainty.Therefore, the conclusion could be drawn that the non-native speakers had better get familiar withthe cultural factors and characteristics of cultural presupposition to achieve better understanding andthe ideal humor effect.Studying the humourous utterances from the perspective of cultural presuppositions couldarouse concern on cultural presuppositions. And studying the humourous utterances in the AcademyAwards is a new point of view that could be also helpful for the enrichment and development of thecase study in pragmatical field and provide practical guidances.