Reinterpreting Conversational Humor: A Pragmatic-Cognitive Integrated Approach

The functions, features and mechanism of conversational humor, have remained a mystery, especially to scholars in various fields all over the world. Much effort has been made to explore this phenomenon: traditional study focuses on the logic and rhetoric of conversational humor; modern pragmatic research maintains that humor is caused by violation of the maxims of Grice's Cooperative Principle; and cognitive research seeks an explanation under the framework of Sperber &Wilson's Relevance Theory.This thesis is designed to propose a pragmatic-cognitive integrated approach based on previous pragmatic and cognitive studies to illustrate the conversational humor and its functions, features and mechanism. It is believed that conversational humor has two main functions, namely informative function and interpersonal function, which enable conversational humor not only to convey certain thought and information, but also to become an effective tool in social communication. The author advocates that violation of Grice's CP is an important feature of conversational humor and that compliance of the principle of relevance accounts for how the audience interprets it in a certain context and gets the intended meaning.