A Study Of Verbal Humor From The Perspective Of Conversational Implicature—a Case Study Of Meng Fei’s Verbal Humor In The Show If You Are The One

Verbal humor plays an important role in people’s daily life. Not only does it entertain people but also it covers many functions, such as expressing opinions, reducing embarrassment, and maintaining social relationship and so on. Verbal humor has always been a hot topic. The show, If You Are the One, is concerned with various topics and is similar to the real interaction in daily life. Meng Fei’s verbal humor is natural and produced out of the on-going exchange of utterance and has great representativeness. Previous studies are mainly connected with the interpretation of verbal humor. This study focuses on production and generation of verbal humor guided by conversational implicature. The most obvious and useful devices used to generate verbal humor are concluded. The former studies of humor are usually concerned with pre-arranged literature, such as jokes printed in books. The kind of published joke collection is too formulaic and has few realistic meanings. This study focuses on spontaneous utterance, which provides practical implications for people to communicate in a humorous way.The study mainly takes the qualitative research method. The study, based on Meng Fei’s verbal expressions, is intended to explore means and devices on the production of verbal humor guided by conversational implicature. The author puts forward two questions:1) How is Meng Fei’s verbal humor achieved under the framework of conversational implicature?2) On the basis of the distributional pattern of the maxims in the cooperative principle and politeness principle, what devices and means are mainly adopted in the production of speakers’ verbal humor in the maxims which are more preferred? The writer randomly collects the humorous text, one from every episode. The data collected covers16months, from January2012to April2013. There are altogether134episodes. The lasting time is long enough to judge a person’s verbal humor and enhance the reliability of the data collected. Every dialogue centers on Meng Fei’s first recognizable humorous expression.Firstly, the author presents the relationship between Meng Fei’s verbal humor and conversational implicature. It can help deepen the understanding of conversational implicature. Statistic results show the four maxims in cooperative principle make up a larger proportion in the verbal humor expressions. On the basis of the result, the author generates some skills and devices which help achieve verbal humor in spontaneous speech. The quality maxim is closely connected with figures of speech, including metaphor, hyperbole and irony. The quantity maxim centers on information, information enrichment and information reduction, the former of which is achieved by analogy and telling stories and the latter of which refers to ellipsis. To produce humorous effect, flouting the relevant maxim mainly relies on lexical expressions, nature of things or contrast between the intended meaning and the result. The manner maxim mainly covers the phonetic and lexical aspects, including assonance, pun, and the antonymy and synonymy relations. Finally, the author tries to distinguish the maxims in detail.The major findings may have its theoretical and practical significance. The skills and means used to generate verbal humor are complementary to the theory of conversational implicature. These devices on the production of verbal humor give some inspirations for communication and comic creation. Besides, distinguishing the maxims in detail is provided.