A Study Of Verbal Humor From The Perspective Of Conversational Implicature

Humor is everywhere in the daily life. As a language phenomenon, humor plays an important role in people’sdaily communication. It not only produces laugher, but also ameliorates human relations and reduces pressure,meanwhile, is endowed with the symbol of personal wisdom and attitude towards life. Most of the English learners inour country are not good at understanding or using verbal humor. To break through this barrier will help them learnEnglish better. Language is human beings’unique ability and communication tool. The creation and the conveying ofhumor are done by means of language in many cases. So among various kinds of humor, verbal humor is the mostuniversal and common. The researchers in the field of philosophy, sociology, and psychology, etc. pay much attentionon verbal humor. This paper, based on the fruitful studies of humor, attempts to analyze and study the verbal humorfrom the perspective of conversational implicature.In recent years, the rapid development of such basic theoretical subjects as semantics, pragmatics and culturallinguistics provided a wider range to study the humor. Humor is a kind of language art; it depends on the inherent lawof language itself, and also to a large extent depends on the usage of language in context. Only when language and thespecific context, the content to express combine, we can accurately understand, appreciate and employ humor. Indifferent contexts, the understanding and appreciation is different, so these pragmatic factors constitute the importantreasons of humor and have not only theoretical value, but also practical value in the humor study field. In daily life, itcan improve people’s communicative ways and efficiency.As early as the1980’s, a preliminary study of humor began in China. This paper, based on theories of humor,attempts to analyze English humor from the perspective of pragmatics and takes an abundance of humorousconversations from the sitcom Friends as analytical materials. The violation of cooperative principle and politenessprinciple in verbal communication produces humorous effect, which is applied to English teaching practice and Cross-cultural communication. This paper mainly introduces the Cooperative Principle, which is the key part ofconversational implicature. Cooperative principle is an effective means to analyze the humorous effects in humorousutterances. The body part of this paper analyzes how the conversational implicature leads to humor in conversations.Deliberate or unintentional violating of the maxims of the PP and CP is analyzed in detail in the humor generation.The object of this thesis is to study verbal humor by means of the two main principles: the CP and PP from theviewpoint of conversational implicature. The most important is that the detailed analysis of a large number ofexamples is helpful to the study of the cross-cultural communication and language of humor. We will master the skillsof understanding and appreciation of humor, make good use of it in our real life and enjoy the pleasure which is brought by humor.