On Verbal Humor In The Perspective Of Pragmatic Presupposition

Humor universally exists in people’s daily life. The researches upon it involve various fields such as philosophy, psychology, sociology, literary, medicine, anthropology, etc. It is not until1970s that linguistics has taken a significant position in humor research area. Humor can be produced via language, facial expressions, body movements, etc, but this thesis will concentrates upon the study of verbal humor. The traditional theories upon humor contain superiority/disparagement theory, relief/release theory and incongruity theory, while modern humor theories involves script theory, semantic script theory of humor(SSTH) and general theory of verbal humor(GTVH).Presupposition is a significant theory of linguistics. It includes semantic presupposition and pragmatic presupposition. Semantic presupposition emphasizes the logical relations and truth value of a sentence while pragmatic presupposition highlights the relationships between a sentence and the context which involves many factors such as the speaker, the addressee, background knowledge and common knowledge or shared knowledge, etc. The current study falls in the domain of pragmatic presupposition, that is, to make a research upon verbal humor in the perspective of pragmatic presupposition. It borrows the semantic script theory of humor (SSTH) put forward by Victor Raskin, and proposes the concept of "presupposition script" which penetrates the whole analysis. Moreover, the author introduces another two concepts of context script and common sense script. Through explorations of numerous humor examples, the author finds that the majorities of humors arise from the incongruity or inconsistence between presupposition script and presupposition script, presupposition script and context script, presupposition script and common sense script, especially the first group.Under the above theoretical framework, this thesis analyzes verbal humor from four dimensions of pragmatic presupposition:the presupposition type; the presupposition property; the presupposition manipulation and the affecting factors of presupposition to create humor. Numerous instances are cited as materials to prove and explain every aspects of presupposition to trigger humor. All of the explorations are dedicated to the internal generating mechanism of verbal humor.