A Pragmatic Study Of English Humor

Humorous language, as the main form to express humor, is popular in our daily life. It comes from our daily life while to some degree it exceeds life. So humorous language is often in the form of conversations in life and thus it has distinctive pragmatic characteristics. In various books on pragmatics, we find humorous conversations function as examples for pragmatic analysis. This shows that there is a close relationship between humor and pragmatics. Effective humorous language often reflects one or several pragmatic characteristics. To review the study of this issue, there are some papers that tend to analyze humor with pragmatic effects or humor with pragmatic characteristics. However, these analyses mainly focus on the flouting of certain maxims of the Cooperative Principle in humor. They also mention some rhetorical devices employed in humor, which are mainly confined to some very common ones: irony, hyperbole and pun. What's more, the limited analyses in these papers are often overlapped. Similarly, in some books about the language of humor, the pragmatic factor is involved, but it only refers to a certain aspect of pragmatics.Through tons of examples of English humor in conversations, this thesis thoroughly studies the pragmatic characteristics reflected in humor. First, the thesis gives an introduction to humor, including the definition of humor, the classification of humor, as well as the analysis of the features of humor and how it functions in our daily life. Based on them, it concludes that it is necessary and scientific to analyze humor especially conversational humor from the pragmatic view. Then there is a general view of pragmatics and what pragmatics studies. It lays emphasis on the Cooperative Principle, which is the core of one aspect of pragmatics -conversational implicature. Although many linguists have been doubtful of the Cooperative Principle, as it provides detailed maxims and sub-maxims, it makes the...