A Pragmatic Study On Puns-from The Perspective Of Pragmatic Markedness Hypothesis

English and Chinese puns have experienced a long history. Pun means the useof sound and polysemy of words to achieve two meanings, namely, literal meaningand implied meaning. Puns attract the attention of scholars at home and abroadbecause they have the function to make language concise and implicit, lively andinteresting, humorous and satiric. The scholars define and classify puns systematicallyand the studies of puns gradually extend to other aspects of linguistics. However, as atraditional figure of speech, the researches of puns usually exist in rhetorical aspect.Although there are indeed some pragmatic studies, they still need to be furtherresearched.Markedness theory, one of the fundamental theories of structuralist linguistics,was put forward by the Prague School in their study of phonemic oppositions. Overthe next few decades, markedness theory has been studied by lots of linguists andpermeated rapidly into different sub-disciplines of linguistics, such as, phonology,morphology, semantics, pragmatics and so on among which the pragmatic studies ofmarkedness theory are comparatively rare and insufficient.Markedness theory didn‘t attract some Chinese scholars‘sights until1980s.From then on, a large number of scholars have made great contributions to the theory.Hou Guojin, for example, developed the traditional markedness theory into pragmaticmarkedness hypothesis which researches the state of markedness on the basis of somepragmatic principles such as relevance theory, indirect speech act, politeness principleand cooperative principle.It is clear that there are various papers and articles dealing with markedness orpuns respectively, few of which combine markedness theory with puns. Although alarge number of papers analyze puns with some pragmatic principles, few of them arebased on the markedness theory. It is advisable to make good use of markednesstheory with which we can understand puns more easily and clearly for it possessesstrong explanatory power. Hou Guojin further develops markedness theory intopragmatic markedness hypothesis, including relevant-irrelevant markedness model, direct-indirect markedness model, polite-impolite markedness model andcooperative-uncooperative markedness model. The hypothesis is employed to studylanguage phenomenon from the perspective of pragmatics. Puns, as a kind oflanguage phenomenon are interpreted by the four models in this thesis to achievebetter pragmatic functions.