Interpretation Of English Verbal Humor:the Perspective Of Pragmatic Enrichment

Humor, specific to human beings, is the seasoning of our daily life and an indispensable part of human speech. Verbal humor is an immanent phenomenon of language use and plays a very important role in the improvement of the interpersonal relationships in social activities. For a long time, humor has attracted many scholars’ attention and interest from different perspectives, such as psychology, physiology, philosophy, sociology, etc. With the rapid development of modern linguistics, the past decades witnessed various approaches to verbal humor, e.g. pragmatics, cognitive pragmatics, cognitive linguistics, systemic functional linguistics, computational linguistics, etc.This thesis attempts to apply the theory of pragmatic enrichment theory to a systematic analysis of the interpretation of English verbal humor. In lexical pragmatics, many linguistic phenomena can be accounted for in terms of pragmatic enrichment. For example, radical semantic underspecification in lexicon can be interpreted in light of the pragmatic mechanism of lexical adjustment. This notion is in accordance with that of pragmatic enrichment guided by Relevance Theory; accordingly, the meanings of words or concepts are specified by the participants involved in the conversation based on the specific context. Pragmatic narrowing and pragmatic broadening are two unified approaches to realize lexical adjustment.Drawn upon the previous studies, this thesis probes into the interpretation of English verbal humor from the perspective of pragmatic enrichment so as to expound the contextual parameters which trigger humorous effects. The analysis covers pragmatic enrichment under situational, cultural and cognitive contexts. Backed up by the principle of optimal relevance, this interpretation employs both pragmatic narrowing and pragmatic broadening as basic strategies.The major findings of the present study are as follows: (a) The interpretation of English verbal humor is a process of pragmatic enrichment; (b) The participants obtains optimal relevance of the humorous utterance, i.e. the ad hoc meaning, through pragmatic narrowing and pragmatic broadening; (c) Triggered by different contextual factors, the participants may conduct an inappropriate or no enrichment, which will stimulate or break the schema of the participants’ expectation for relevance, thus producing the humorous effect.