Analysis And Implication Of Threefold Context And Pragmatic Functions In Verbal Humor

Verbal humor is a linguistic phenomenon in social life and it is the crystal of human’s wisdom. The researches on it mainly exist in the fields of linguistics, physiology, psychology, philosophy, aesthetics and sociology. The earlier researchers propose three famous traditional viewpoints:view of Superiority, view of Relief and that of Incongruity. Focusing on speakers, the three viewpoints analyze the occurring procedure of verbal humor. Modern linguists have carried out further researches on humor from cognitive semantics, social pragmatics and functional linguistics, which have made great contribution to the studies on humor. Raskin proposes Semantic Script Theory of Humor, which indicates script shift mechanism to analyze semantic-pragmatic process contained in humor. Nowadays many researchers at home have studied the producing and understanding process of humor which are explained by violating Cooperation Principles, or investigated from the Speech Act Theory, or made use of the Relevance Theory. This research proposes that the producing and understanding of verbal humor rely on contexts, and the pragmatic function of verbal humor occurs within contexts. Combined with examples from the famous American magazine Reader’s Digest, the research analyzes verbal humor’s threefold context based on pragmatics. interprets the effect of three contexts on producing and understanding verbal humor, and demonstrates verbal humor’s pragmatic functions. Verbal humor’s threefold context involves linguistic context, situational context and cultural context. Linguistic context refers to the co-text of verbal humor, including elements as pronunciation, word meaning, sentence structure, and so on. Situational context refers to the time, place, the participators and their relationship, and the nature of the event, which are contained in the verbal humor. Cultural context relates the historical and cultural background the text meets with, containing elements as the social customs, conventions, values, culture, and so on.Combined with discourse analysis, this research finds that:1) Verbal humor has special construction rules, especially its threefold context which interweaves together and interacts well.2) People use verbal humor with clear aims, and it partly depends on speaker’s language level, value and general knowledge so on and so forth to reach humorous effect, while there are differences on contexts and effects according to different listeners when facing the same verbal humor.3) There are gaps in language and culture for China’s English learners to understand western verbal humor. This research systematically studies Verbal humor’s various pragmatic functions. Verbal humor relieves people’s negative emotions which help people get relaxed. It can be appropriately applied as tools of criticism and self-defending, which shows one’s self-confidence and personality charm. It also helps to make clear the gulf between the communicators, shortens their distances and reconciles conflicts, which helps to construct good interpersonal relationships.Based on its pragmatic functions, this study concretely expounds the significance of incorporating verbal humor in English teaching. Combined with its threefold context, this thesis discusses the ways of applying verbal humor in English vocabulary teaching and English culture teaching, which have practical significance in improving learners’English interests and in enhancing teaching effects.