A Pragmatic Study Of The Mechanisms And Functions Of Humor In The Movie Dialogues

Humor is the lubricant in our life. Humor renders our life no longer monotonous and boring. To some extent, humor makes the life positive and optimistic, and thus humor is indispensable to people’s life. This thesis first reviews the definition of humor, its classification and the relation with movie dialogues. Humor is too complicated to be defined with exact words. The comprehension of humor varies from individual to individual. Humor is an artistically linguistic form for study and research. Movies have become a popular approach of cultural transmission, especially many classical movie languages which are derived from our daily life. Therefore, the study of movie dialogues actually is to research on the linguistic communication between people and people which is of great significance.Pragmatics specializes in the study of language comprehension and use. It mainly focuses on the given dialogues in a given context. In language use. speakers do not simply convey the static meaning of linguistic elements and signs, while the hearers often understand the speakers’ real purposes by means of a series of psychological inference. The study of pragmatics does not have a long history, but its theories are profound and have a strong power of explanation. This thesis applies pragmatic theories to discuss the following two key questions:What are the mechanisms that produce humor? What are the functions of humor in the movie dialogues?This thesis applies such classical theories as Cooperate Principle. Politeness Principle and Adaptation Theory to analyze the dialogues taken from many English and American movies in different angles and explains the strategies for humor production and linguistic approaches. It is based on many pragmatic theories that we can explain how to generate humor in different contexts exactly and comprehensively. The methods and fruits of pragmatics not only help us better appreciate linguistic art in movies, but facilitate communication between people and people in everyday life.