A Comparative Study Of Verbal Humour Between Chinese And American Talk Shows From The Perspective Of Pragmatic Presupposition

Pragmatic presupposition,as a frequently used phenomenon in human communication,is always a crucial research focus in the study on the generation system of verbal humour.By recent years,many pieces of research have been conducted on the relationship between classification and characteristics of pragmatic presuppositions and verbal humour.However,these researches either focused on the relationship between classification of pragmatic presuppositions and verbal humour,or concentrated on the relationship between characteristics of pragmatic presuppositions and verbal humour,few of them explored the similarities and differences in generation of verbal humour between Chinese and American talk shows from the perspective of pragmatic presuppositions.Thus,this thesis manages to investigate the similarities and differences in generation of verbal humour between Chinese Tencent Video's Roast and American Comedy Central's Roast from the perspective of classification and characteristics of pragmatic presuppositions based on Jiang Bingqing's(2009)theory.The selected data in this thesis are 160 cases about classification of pragmatic presuppositions for generation of verbal humour and 160 cases about characteristics of pragmatic presuppositions for generation of verbal humour,taken from Tencent Video's Roast and Comedy Central's Roast.Then,the collected data were re-categorized and analyzed by Statistic Package for Social Science(SPSS)software to find out the similarities and differences in generation of verbal humour between Chinese and American talk shows from the perspective of pragmatic presupposition.The results show that,firstly,no significant difference has been found in pragmatic presuppositions for generation of verbal humour between Chinese and American talk shows.Secondly,no significant difference has been found in cases about classification of pragmatic presuppositions for generation of verbal humour between Chinese and American talk shows: in Tencent Video's Roast,the frequency of cases about classification of pragmatic presuppositions for generation of verbal humour is state presupposition(41.3%),factive presupposition(37.5%),behavioralpresupposition(13.7%),and existential presupposition(7.5%);in Comedy Central's Roast,the frequency of cases about classification of pragmatic presupposition for generation of verbal humour is factive presupposition(37.5%),state presupposition(36.3%),behavioral presupposition(14.9%),and existential presupposition(11.3%).Thirdly,as for characteristics of pragmatic presupposition,although there is no significant difference has been found in utilizing or violating felicity(15.0% and23.8%),mutual-recognition(28.8% and 25.0%),and subjectivity(32.4% and 28.7%)of pragmatic presuppositions to generate verbal humour between Chinese and American talk shows,there is significant difference in utilizing defeasibility(23.8%and 22.5%)of pragmatic presuppositions to generate verbal humour between Chinese and American talk shows: Tencent Video's Roast tends to cancel presuppositions by non-linguistic elements to generate verbal humour while the frequencies of cancelling presuppositions by non-linguistic elements and linguistic elements are equal in Comedy Central's Roast.The author believes that the similarities found in the data could be interpreted by the embodiment hypothesis,and the differences found in the data may result from the different cultures between China and America.This thesis verifies the applicability of Jiang Bingqing's(2009)theory in studying the relationship between verbal humour and pragmatic presuppositions and enriches the range of texts which can be adopted as data to study the relationship between verbal humour and pragmatic presuppositions.Besides,the thesis also helps to offer a better understanding of generation system of verbal humour.