A Pragmatics Analysis Of The Verbal Humor In American Animated Cartoon Films

Humor is the distinctive feature of human beings. As a way of interpersonal interaction, it is an important part of cultures and languages in different countries. The study on humor is a multi-discipline and has been approached from different perspectives, such as philosophy, psychology, sociology, linguistics, literature and anthropology. However, the previous research both at home and abroad hasn't introduced the definition, the generative mechanism and the expression ways of humor systematically. Since the 1980s, with the development of Pragmatics, the scholars have made great contribution to the humor research.With economic globalization and China's opening up to the world, it has become more and more important for the younger generation to learn English. Because of this trend, many materials have been used to help the children to learn English, especially to improve their competence of speaking and listening. The American animated cartoon films become a good choice of learning material for its interesting dialogues, fatanstic design and exciting plot. Because of this characteristics of the American animated cartoon films, they arouse the students'great interest in seeing. In addition, as the carrier of verbal humor, the animated cartton films has provided lots of typical materials for the pragmatic research on verbal humor.Based on the traditional theories of humor at home and abroad, the thesis employs three pragmatics theories, the Cooperative Principle, the Face-saving Theory, and the Relevance Theory, to analyze the examples of verbal humor in the American animated cartoon films. These humorous utterances are selected from 9 films that made by the Disney company, the Dreamworks and the 20^th Century Fox. This thesis does a text-based research by using a qualitative research method. The main purpose is to examine how the verbal humors are presented from the perspective of pragmatics. The research is done in the following procedures: (1) Providing the context, that is, the conditions which the utterances happens; (2) Choosing the verbal humor that arouses laughter of the viewers as the corpus; (3)Analyzing these materials with a certain kind of pragmatic theory in detail. For example, the verbal humor may be arisen by flouting some maxims of CP or produced by threatening the hearer or speaker's positive face or negative face.In recent years, most scholars pay more attention to the theoretical aspect of the study on humor, but not focus on the applicability of humor in daily communication. By analyzing these utterances in the conversations in detail, the author has made a tentative exploration for the generated mechanism of the verbal humor and made some suggestions to help people to comprehend and appreciate English verbal humor. Apart form these, the author has given the possible reasons why second language learners cannot understand the verbal humor in the American animated cartoon films, which include: (1) the differences of the cultures between America and China; (2) the lack of knowledge of American literature; (3) the poor pragmatic inference competence. To solve these problems, the author puts that the learners should not only learn more language knowledge but should also cultivate the pragmatic competence in the process of Second Language Acquisition, (shorted as SLA). The author believes that to understand and appreciate the verbal humor in the American animated films is helpful to improve this competence. In addition to these reasons, the author thinks that the appreciation differences between the viewers of different ages, different educational backgrounds and different life backgrounds can also influence the comprehension of the verbal humor.