Linguistic Presupposition Analysis In Humors

An exploration of humors will unfold many factors in them that trigger laughter, such asthe tones of telling, circumstances where humors occur, and the language of the humors. Thisthesis, however, confines its research scope to English verbal communication only, andpinpoints one linguistic phenomenon, that is to say, linguistic presupposition, to analyze itsfunction of producing the effect of laughter.In this thesis a detailed analysis of the functions of presupposition in humors will begiven to demonstrate that presupposition can trigger the laugher of the humors where they areentailed. The analysis is carried out under the structure of a "script model".A script is a large chunk of semantic information surrounding the word or evoked by it.Through an interaction with theories of both semantic presupposition and pragmaticpresupposition reviewed in the first half of the thesis, the notion of "script" is developed intoa presupposition script and further on, an analytical model. This model together with its twosub-models designed for semantic and pragmatic presuppositions respectively, is then put onhumor cases coming from either real life, the Internet or the magazine, to test its feasibility.Meanwhile, humor theory is also introduced to help with the analysis process.The focuses of the research is aimed at proving that presuppositions in humors arefunctioning in creating humorous effect in an explainable, systematic way, rather thanrandomly. In addition, this thesis is also a tentative exploration to combine linguistic andhumor psychology, and hopefully this attempt can be available for future in-depth study inthis interdisciplinary field.