Research On Humor In TED Talks From The Perspective Of Sham Pragmatic Presupposition

As a nonprofit organization,TED talks attract people's attention because of its humor and original ideas.The popularity of the TED talks in the world attracts some scholar's attention,but they mainly focus on its application in English language teaching and intercultural communication,little attention is paid to the verbal humor in the TED talks.And humor can be an important element contributing to a successful speech.Sham pragmatic presupposition universally exists in the daily communication,which is relevant to conventional pragmatic presupposition but is a different concept.And the subjective sham pragmatic presupposition is a pragmatic strategy often used in the daily entertainments.This paper mainly studies the verbal humor in the TED talks from the sham pragmatic presupposition perspective,so as to find out the humor mechanism.This paper used the qualitative analysis method.Because the study perspective of this paper is the sham pragmatic presupposition,the speeches selected from 2005 to 2016 can be classified according to the humor features in the speeches.Eventually,22 TED talks are available for this research,which include the persuasion,entertainment and information.The results showed that: by breaking the conventional layout of information flow in the discourse,inducing the other party to misunderstand the intention and shifting the sentence focus,the speakers treated the unshared information as the presupposed information,and set “presupposition traps.” As the audiences went through ups and downs,and enlightenment,the humorous effects could be created,and the convincingness could be strengthened.