A Pragmatic Analysis Of Verbal Humor In American Talk Show "The Ellen Show"

Humor is very familiar to human beings, which is an important tool of communication in people's daily life. It symbolizes the wisdom of human beings and reflects human's attitude and emotion towards life. Humor brings plenty of happiness for people. Meanwhile, it is a useful way for human maintaining harmonious relationships. For many years, people never cease the research on humor. Scholars from different fields and countries carry out research on humor and achieve fruitful outcomes. The scholars provide various views on the generation and interpretation of humor. However, among these outcomes, seldom research has been conducted based on the verbal humor in talk show. Talk show, with its amusing plot and humorous utterances, provides plentiful examples for the study of verbal humor. Nowadays,the American talk show "The Ellen Show" is very popular among people all over the world.The style and the dialogues in this talk show have the typical features of talk show. The thesis chooses verbal humor in this popular talk show as research data to analyze the inner generation mechanism of verbal humor.From the perspective of pragmatics, the thesis chooses Cooperative Principle and Relevance Theory in exploring typical examples of verbal humor in "The Ellen Show".Meanwhile, the thesis compares the differences between these two theories and the inner mechanisms on the interpretation of verbal humor. Based on the two important pragmatic theories, the thesis makes a tentative study on the generation mechanism of verbal humor,which provides a new way for people to understand and appreciate verbal humor. On account of the data drawn from "The Ellen Show",the author applies the qualitative method to carry out the research. After categorizing the examples of verbal humor in "The Ellen Show",the author uses Cooperative Principle and Relevance Theory to analyze examples chosen from the talk show. The thesis also makes comparisons between the two different theories from the perspective of theoretical source, theoretical model and inferential model. All these divergences lead to the difference on the interpretation of the inner generation mechanism of verbal humor.The present thesis is composed of six chapters. Chapter One presents the background of the study, elaborates the objective and significance of the study, introduces the research methodology of the thesis and also makes a clear introduction about the structure of the whole thesis. Chapter Two is literature review. It introduces the related research on humor and talk show respectively. This chapter mainly presents the definition and classification of humor, the formerly studies on humor and talk show from different fields. This chapter also gives a brief introduction about the popular American talk show "The Ellen Show". Chapter Three is the theoretical framework of the thesis, namely, Cooperative Principle and Relevance Theory.Chapter Four applies these two pragmatic theories to exploring the representative examples drawn from the talk show to study the inner generation mechanism of verbal humor. Chapter Five makes a comparison between Cooperative Principle and Relevance Theory from the perspective of theoretical source, theoretical model and inferential model. Furthermore, it analyzes the advantages and limitations between the two theories. These differences lead to different interpretation on the generation mechanisms of verbal humor. Chapter Six draws a conclusion of the present thesis, pointing out the limitations of the study and provides suggestions for the future studies in this field.After the detailed analysis of verbal humor in "The Ellen Show", it can be drawn form the results that humorous effect could be achieved by violating the maxims (quality, quantity,relation and manner) of Cooperative Principle. Furthermore, the gap between maximal relevance and optimal relevance can also produce humorous effects. Both of the two theories have great interpretation power to explain the humor data. Cooperative Principle interprets verbal humor from the root, which explains all humor produced due to violation of maxims and put them in the inner mechanism. This helps people understand humor and its generation from a deeper level but in a clear and simple manner. Relevance Theory has a wide range of practical value. In addition to the elimination of ambiguity in analysis of verbal humor,it has certain significance in enriching the meaning of words. By analysis and researching, we can find that they vary each other in terms of the objective manifestation, theoretical models,context, and processing objects. They interpret verbal humor in different ways. The thesis applies Cooperative Principle and Relevance Theory into the interpretation of verbal humor,which extends the approaches for humor studies. To some extent, the thesis enriches the pragmatic theories on the creation of verbal humors. The present study help people get a deep understanding of the inner generation mechanism of verbal humor, which will improve our perception and appreciation of humorous utterances.