An Analysis Of Verbal Humor In Microblog Jokes From Perspective Of Pragmatic Presupposition

With the development of science and technology, Internet has been turning out to be the most important media which influences people’s ways of thinking and living. Under such background of era, microblog as a new communication platform rises up rapidly with the development of the Internet. Meanwhile, a new linguistic phenomenon named microblog jokes or duanzi in Chinese which is entirely different from those spread in traditional print media enjoys great popularity.Microblog joke is one language form which is published in a microblogging platform and widely spread through the Internet. Its concise and interesting expression is favored by the majority of Internet users. Humor can be sensed almost everywhere in our daily life. It is generally accepted as one kind of tendency of particular cognitive experiences to provoke laughter and amusement. The laughter-eliciting mechanism of humor, as an old and conversational phenomenon, relatively has been explored by many scholars from many aspects like philosophy, rhetoric, psychology, sociology and so on. Linguists first study verbal humor from the aspects of Conversational Implication and Relevance theory. Nowadays, many recent studies have given due attention to the pragmatic presupposition analysis. However, the research of this aspect is not sufficient and the study of microblog jokes from pragmatic presupposition theory is even less.This thesis, based on pragmatic presupposition approach, attempts to make a qualitative study on verbal humor in microblog jokes. The first chapter introduces the objectives and significance of this study. Chapter2is a literature review of the traditional theories. The detailed introduction of the presupposition theory is given in this part. Chapter3deals with the methodology of this thesis. In chapter4, about30jokes are taken from the various microblog platforms and analyzed from the properties of the presupposition in order to illustrate how those jokes work by utilizing those properties. Besides, verbal humor can be propelled by presetting, preserved, false and contradicted presupposition. The last part of the thesis discusses some findings and limitations of this study.This study aims to reveal how pragmatic presuppositions function in microblog jokes to achieve humorous effects in the hope of making some contributions to the presupposition studies on verbal humor and to test the theory with real conversation. What’s more, the findings of this study have provided some useful suggestions for people to comprehend and appreciate the verbal humor and also for the microblog jokes writers to create more intriguing comic jokes.