A Pragmatic Analysis Of Verbal Humor In The Adventures Of Tom Sawyer

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (shortened as Tom Sawyer), the masterpiece by Mark Twin, is famous for both its humorous utterances of the characters and its funny plots. Regretfully, most previous studies on this particular book are mainly from the perspective of discourse analysis, rather than from the perspective of pragmatic theories. In this thesis, the author tries to analyze its verbal humor from the pragmatic perspective on bases of Cooperative Principles.Cooperative Principle, proposed by Grice, believes both addressers and addressees unconsciously follow four principles to make the conversations proceed smoothly and effectively:Maxim of quality, maxim of quantity, maxim of relevance, maxim of manner. Meanwhile, according to Bergson, humors can be classified into two categories:situational humor, such as cartoons, faces, and verbal humor which refers to humors expressed in language. This thesis reconciles the two theories to discuss and analyze verbal humors, namely, the humorous conversations in Tom Sawyer from the perspective of cooperative principle.To achieve the purpose mentioned above, a quantitative study will be conducted first:all the humors in the book The Adventures of Tom Sawyer will be picked out in the accordance of the definition of humor given by Apte and classified into be exact, more than two hundreds humors are collected this way from this novel. Then author classifies all the humors into situational humor and verbal humor. Totally, forty verbal humors are found out strictly following the conception of the verbal humor.Then, all the verbal humors will be classed four groups in the light of four maxims:maxim of quantity, maxim of quality, maxim of relevance, and maxim of manner. The author selected thirty typical examples to analyze and illustrate. To the humors created by flouting the principle of quantity, the conversation of deliberately offering less information and more information are tackled. It can easily find out how humor effect by flouting maxim of quantity. Maxim of quality requires us to do not say what you believe to be false. The author probes into six examples to reveal being false on purpose in intention as in rhetorical questions and false in content as in direct lies will achieve the sense of humor. The maxims of relevance need us to offer information that has something to do with a conversation. The author takes three examples to show how the characters flout the maxim of relevance in the novel which use of the strategies such as giving hits or giving association clues in order to produce humor effects. Maxim of manner calls speaker to be orderly or clearly. The author lists four examples to show the relation between flouting the maxim of manner and humor effect which use of strategies of ambiguity, incomplete sentences and vague sentences.By the analysis of verbal humor in Tom Sawyer from CP, the author finds how humor effect created and there are indeed utterances which produce humor effects by flouting the maxims of CP.Hopefully, this research will fill the blank in the research of this particular book from the perspective of pragmatics, though it was believed to be thoroughly studied from the perspective of literature. Through the pragmatics analysis of this novel, people can get a better understanding of Mark Twain’s works. Meanwhile, it will help us know how to create humor and appreciate humor.