The Study Of Verbal Humor In English Jokes From The Perspective Of Presupposition Theory

Humor is a very common phenomenon and it has been widely used in TV series,movies, sitcoms and other kinds of entertainment. In our daily life, language is afundamental tool for people to communicate with each other. Therefore, a vast of humoreffect must be reflected through language, and joke is just a linguistic expression of humor.It is a common convey of humor. Jokes are the humorous words said or written. On the onehand, jokes could make one feel happy and relaxed, forgetting their troubles anddifficulties. On the other hand, some pieces of jokes could not only be funny but also canreveal some provoking truths and principles. When people communicate with each other,there must be some common ground or shared information between them, which canguarantee the smoothness and success of the speech act. This common ground or shared information is the presupposition in pragmatics. A lot of jokes apply differentpresuppositions between the speaker and hearer to achieve humorous effects.This thesis adopts presupposition theory in pragmatics to interpret the generativemechanism of humor in English jokes.35pieces of typical English jokes are selected forthe current study and all research data is divided into three parts for further analysis: first,it applies the properties of pragmatic presupposition to study English jokes, such asappropriateness, common ground and defeasibility. If the communicators’ utterances areincongruous with linguistic context, or they lack the common knowledge, as well as oneside adds some words cancelling the former presupposition, they can all make people laugh.Second, it uses some strategic types of presupposition such as added presupposition, falsepresupposition and preserved presupposition. If the communicators add some importantinformation, provide false information deliberately or preserve the presupposition byapplying different linguistic expressions, they can make a sharp difference betweenpeople’s expectation and the real fact, thus creating a humorous effect. Third, somerhetorical presuppositions such as pun, satire, exaggeration, simile and metaphor, couldalso make people laugh. Rhetoric itself is to express a certain fact by roundabout andingenious language expression and humor always exists in the incongruity betweenlinguistic expression and the fact. This thesis is mainly qualitative as well as usingdescriptive and analytical method. Through analyzing how humorous effects are achievedunder presupposition theory in these35jokes, the study concludes that presuppositiontheory is one of the most important factors of humorous effects in English jokes, and itplays an indispensable part in the interpretation of joking materials.The paper can help people acquaint with some basic linguistic knowledge, understandthe generative mechanism of English jokes under presupposition principle and improvetheir perception of English jokes, making English learners more interested in English jokesand help them better understand it.