On Verbal Humor In Top Funny Comedian From The Perspective Of Pragmatic Competence

Verbal humor is the kind of humor conveyed by languages and an effect achieved by language application.Verbal humor is a ladder to triumphant statements and assists for eliciting laughter;thereby it is largely used in TV variety programs,especially comedic programs.Top Funny Comedian is a comedy competition and star live show first launched on Dragon TV on April 25,2015.The available articles concerning Top Funny Comedian tend to discuss the factors behind its success and popularity but seldom do they analyze the specialty of the language used in its works.Pragmatic competence is a study branch of pragmatics and is closely linked to the verbal humor and the success of the works in this program.This thesis is conducted from the perspective of pragmatic competence and the study results show that: 1.Top Funny Comedian is very successful from the perspective of pragmatic competence.This program consists of comedians,the host and the audience,each playing a role in producing or perceiving the verbal humor,which guarantees the presentation of the works and the effect of the program.2.Chen Xinren's study on pragmatic competence is effective for discussing the whole chain of verbal humor.Comedians and the host shoulder the responsibility of producing verbal humor which is completed by pragmalinguistic competence,sociopragmatic competence and dicoursal competence;pragmacognitive competence explains how audience perceive it.3.With the help of pragmatic competence,comedians present the fascination of Chinese language art.Apart from Mandarin Chinese,dialects of northeast China,Henan Province,Shandong Province and Baoding City also make a show.Their intervention exhibits the variety of Chinese language,shortens the distance between the program and the native speakers of dialects and offers other audience a chance to acquaint different dialects and appreciate them,which is conducive to cultural communication.This thesis is composed of six chapters altogether.The first chapter is a combination of introduction and literature review.Part one of Chapter One introduces background,purpose and significance of the study as well as its layout.Part two of Chapter One gives a general analysis of Top Funny Comedian,and includes studies on verbal humor and a synthesized report on pragmatic competence where Chen Xinren's research is given more emphasis and is adopted as theoretical frame of this thesis.Chapter Two to Chapter Five are the main body,probing into the four sub-classifications of pragmatic competence respectively and exploring their effects on verbal humor in Top Funny Comedian.Chapter Two and Three analyze the positive function of comedians' utterance for verbal humor production from the perspective of pragmalinguistic competence and discoursal competence.Pragmalinguistic competence is embodied by phonetic techniques,lexical techniques and syntactic techniques while discoursal competence by unexpected incoherence,odd turn-taking and floor-holding and violation of Grice's maxim of quality.Chapter Four foucuses on socialpragmatic competence of the host and discusses how his verbal humor is shown during his interaction with audience and comedians.Performing face-threatening acts,addressing power relations in conversation and deliberate mistaking comedians' gender are three obvious devices.The audience are the study subject of the next chapter.Chapter Five expounds on audience's pragmacogntive competence in perceiving verbal humor.Audience's appreciation of comedic works is an inferential process.Relevance and its principles related to this process are within the study domain of this chapter.The last chapter is the conclusion.It records the major findings of this thesis,points the limitations and gives suggestions for further studies.