Analysis Of Verbal Humor In Forrest Gump From The Perspective Of Presupposition Theory

The study on humor has a long history.In the West,studies on humor mainly apply Raskin’s script theory,Attardo and Raskin’s general theory of verbal humor as well as three traditional theories of humor-superiority theory,relief theory and incongruity theory.With the rise of pragmatics,domestic scholars begin to study humor production mechanisms from the perspective of pragmatics.With the development of linguistics,presupposition has drawn much attention from scholars abroad and at home.Studies on the relationship between presupposition and verbal humor mainly focus on presupposition property,presupposition types,the use of presupposition and how they trigger humor.Forrest Gump is a classical film.The humorous dialogues contribute to its success.Pragmatic studies on Forrest Gump in China do not involve presupposition theory.In this thesis,the author tries to analyze dialogues in Forrest Gump to find out how verbal humor is produced by pragmatic presupposition properties such as cancellability,appropriateness and mutual knowledge.Three questions are to be discussed:1)How does cancellability of pragmatic presupposition produce verbal humor in Forrest Gump?2)How does violating appropriateness of pragmatic presupposition produce verbal humor in Forrest Gump?3)How does inconsistency with mutual knowledge of pragmatic presupposition produce verbal humor in Forrest Gump?Qualitative research method is applied in this thesis.The author uses humorous dialogues in Forrest Gump as research material.Film lines in Forrest Gump are downloaded from the Internet.The author sorts out all the humorous dialogues which involve presuppositions.Owing to too many humorous dialogues and the limited space,the author selects some typical humorous dialogues as research data.The study finds that in Forrest Gump,cancellability of pragmatic presupposition brings about verbal humor in two aspects:first,it occurs in the speaker’s own utterances.The latter utterance is inconsistent with the presupposition produced by the former utterance;second,the hearer’s utterance is inconsistent with the presupposition produced by the speaker’s utterance.Verbal humor which arises from violating appropriateness is of three types:the speaker uses a false presupposition and the hearer misunderstands the presupposition;the speaker’s utterance is inconsistent with general logic,general knowledge or background knowledge;the speaker uses a false presupposition.Verbal humor produced by inconsistency with mutual knowledge is embodied in two aspects:the speaker lacks common background knowledge and his utterance is inconsistent with background knowledge or the presupposition produced in specific situational contexts;the hearer’s utterance is inconsistent with the presupposition produced by the speaker’s utterance.This research is of value in that it tries to explain verbal humor from the aspect of presupposition theory,which provides a new perspective to understand and appreciate verbal humor.In addition,it enriches studies on practical application of pragmatic presupposition.Besides,it gives us some implications that presupposition properties can be used in daily communications to create humorous effects and they are also helpful to facilitate smooth communications in language teaching and learning.