A Cognitive-Pragmatic Approach To Aggressive Humor In The Context Of Online Talk Show

Aggressive humor is a type of humor with an obvious intention to damage others’ faces.It is of great significance in enriching language expression and managing social relations.In the wake of the development of Internet,online entertainment program meets its high time.Aggressive humor plays an important role in the development of these programs,for it contributes much to amusement.Hence,the study of aggressive humor in online talk shows bears guidelines for line design in entertainment programs and humor production in people’s everyday life.The present study conducts a pragmatic-cognitive perspective on aggressive humor in online talk shows.On one hand,it explores the production of aggressive humor.On the other hand,it discusses the interpretation mechanism of aggressive humor.The study adopts the methods of literature review,corpus building,and discourse analysis to illustrate the phenomenon of aggressive humor.The literature review lays a theoretical foundation for the study.The main theoretical bases of the study are the garden-path humor mechanism and pragmatic game theory.Then,the self-built corpus provides materials for further analysis.The analysis is carried out in qualitative and quantitative methods.The qualitative analysis,as the main method in the study,takes the form of discourse analysis,while the quantitative analysis provides statistical evidence for the qualitative analysis.Under the guidance of theoretical bases,with the methods of qualitative and quantitative analysis,the production and interpretation mechanisms are expounded in the study.Grounded upon the methodology,the study draws two conclusions.In terms of production of aggressive humor,the study finds pragmatic ambiguity to be its generating source.Pragmatic ambiguity in aggressive humor can be divided into three types: purelyinferential humor,linguistic-motivated humor,and presupposition humor.In addition,rhetorical techniques in pragmatic ambiguity enhance the effect of aggressive humor.In terms of interpretation mechanism,aggressive humor involves the three stages as followed: reception of raw information,preliminary processing,and interpretation.They respectively include the cognitive efforts for decoding,linguistic matching,and interpretation selection.To sum up,built upon previous studies,the thesis puts forth the concept of aggressive humor.It reveals the inner connection between impoliteness and humor to display the research value of this topic.Moreover,this study approaches humor from a cognitive-pragmatic perspective.It takes pragmatic ambiguity as the source for the production of aggressive humor and considers its interpretation as a language game.This provides new insight into humor study.