Pragmatic Presuppositional Exploration Of Verbal Humor In More Happiness From More Talks

Presupposition exits in almost all types of verbal communications and different aspectsof verbal communications with no exception of verbal humor. It is powerful and convincingin interpreting verbal humor. The thesis attempts to give a tentative analysis on humorousexamples in a Chinese talk show More Happiness from More Talks to explore how pragmaticpresupposition functions to achieve humorous effects in the dynamic communicatig context.Presupposition, originating from philosophy, for centuries has been a major topic forresearchers from different fields. In linguistics, it is generally divided into semanticpresupposition and pragmatic presupposition. The present study is to proceed based on thepragmatic perspective. A pragmatic presupposition refers to the speaker’s belief orassumption about the context in which the communication takes place. It is hidden inutterances without expressing directly and not necessarily to be true. When contradicts thecontext or common sense, it will be cancelled. An utterance has a set of presuppositions indifferent contexts, and different people may infer different presuppositions from the sameutterance. In communicating process, on the one hand, the speaker always treats someinformation that he or she believes to be true as presupposition and organizes his or herutterance according to his or her intention and subjective knowledge about the world. On theother hand, the hearer may infer a different presupposition and continue the communicationbased on it. The different manipulations and appreciation of presupposition between thespeaker and the hearer leads to contradiction which finally reaches unexpected results andmakes the utterance sound humorous.Together with the Incongruity Theory of humor, the thesis gives a tentative analysis onpresupposition-propelled humorous examples in the show from three aspects: humor byspeaker’s strategic manipulations of presupposition, humor by hearer’s strategicmanipulations of presupposition, and the presupposition-elicited incongruity. The tentativeanalysis on humorous examples manifests1) that humorous effects in the show are realizedby means of different manipulations of pragmatic presuppositions by the speaker and thehearer: the speaker tends to apply sham presupposition, cancel presupposition of his ownutterances and preserve presupposition as oppose to the hearer’s misapprehension, distortionand cancellation of the speaker’s presuppositions. Among them, canceling presupposition byspeaker himself, hearer’s canceling and distorting presupposition of speaker’s utterance aremore widely used to create humor than others;2) that incongruity in the show can beattributed to presuppositions contradictory to common sense, to the following utterances andto the speaker’s intention. According to Incongruity Theory, humor is resulted from the perception of various forms of incongruity. That is to say, the presupposition-elicitedincongruity is the ultimate reason for humor in the show.It is hoped that the pragmatic presupposition approach to the Chinese talk show maycontribute slightly to better appreciation of verbal humor in talk show and the application ofpragmatic presupposition in dynamic communicating context.