A Pragmatic Analysis Of Verbal Humor In How I Met Your Mother

As a multi-discipline research topic, humor has drawn the attention of scholars in philosophy, psychology, literature, sociology, linguistics and anthropology. After the 80s of the 20th century, many linguists began to study verbal humor from pragmatic perspective and have made great contribution in this field, which brings humor research into a new era.Based on the conventional humor theories of verbal humor such as incongruity, superiority and relief theory, this paper probes into the linguistic characteristics of verbal humor by analyzing data taken from the American sitcom How I Met Your Mother, and intends to find out how verbal humor works in cognitive context. This paper holds that verbal humor is a specialized conversational implicature and should be studied from pragmatic perspective.This study shows that: the intentional or unintentional flouting of the maxims of Cooperative Principle, flouting or abiding the maxims of Politeness Principle, and creating the gap between the maximal relevance and optimal relevance would result in the incongruity between the hearer's expectation and the speaker's original intention which is the starting point for verbal humor; the comprehension of humor firstly depends on the decoding of the literal meaning of utterances or letters, and then on the comprehension of context. By constructing proper cognitive context, the hearer can make the right inference of the utterance implication and understands the humor. This study could be of help to Chinese audience in comprehending and appreciating the verbal humor in English, and improve their understanding of the inner working mechanism of language and thus enhance their language competence.This thesis is composed of four chapters, with chapter one as the introduction, chapter two to chapter three the main body and chapter four the summary.Chapter two serves as literature review. It elaborates the definitions, classifications of humor, and pragmatic theories used in this paper. It also briefly introduces the previous researches on humor and especially the pragmatic studies on humor. Chapter three serves as the key of this thesis. It provides the pragmatic interpretation by analyzing verbal humor examples based on pragmatic theories such as Cooperative Principle, Politeness Principle, Relevance Theory, and explores into the production and perception mechanism of verbal humor.