A Cognitive Pragmatic Study Of The Interpretation Of Humorous Utterances

Humor is a pervasive human phenomenon, observable in many spheres and aspects of life, in various human interactions and especially in jokes and humorous stories. The use of humorous utterances is an elegant language art and of great significance for the maintenance of a harmonious interpersonal relationship between people. Humor is often created and transmitted through language. Because of the close relationship between language and humor, the study of the humor can offer us a better understanding of humor, of the language used to create and transmit humor, and of people using humor in their expressions. In recent years, people have been aware of the close relationship between language and humor, and the study of humor from a linguistics view is drawing people's more attention especially the application of pragmatic theories into the study of humor. After Austin (1962) and Grice (1975) put forward the Speech Acts Theory and Cooperative Principle respectively, Sperber and Wilson (1986, 1995) put forward the Relevance Theory, and the three theories have become the main pragmatic theories and have been applied into the study of humor.Speech Acts Theory is a philosophical explanation of the nature of linguistic communication. It aims to answer the question"what do we do when using language?"Speech Acts Theory provides great philosophical insight into the nature of linguistic communication for its explanation of language comprehension in a certain context. In 1970s, Herbert Paul Grice put forward his Cooperative Principle theory, a theory trying to study language interpretation and the comprehension of nature language, and it has been drawing the attention of many linguists. Sperber and Wilson, in 1986 and 1995, put forward Relevance Theory, which, as a new perspective to study language production and interpretation, combines mental cognitive process into language use. The Relevance Theory investigates language, especially its interpretation, in view of mental activities and cognition, regarding deduction and inference as the mode of interpretation and the optimal relevance as the only maxim effect of interpreting words. However, like Speech Acts theory and CP, the Relevance Theory still can not describe the cognitive origin of language comprehension or language interpretation and cannot give an acceptable explanation of the specific inference process of language interpretation, thus hindering its application into the study of humorous utterances.Lakoff and Johnson published, in 1999, Philosophy in the Flesh:The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought, in which they argue that the philosophical foundation of cognitive linguistics is the philosophy in the flesh and the cognitive origin of language interpretation, is the conflict or overlapping between the addressee's current experiences and his past ones. The current study, from the three basic principles of the philosophy in the Flesh, i.e. The Embodied Mind, Cognitive Unconscious, Metaphorical Thought, tries to analyze and describe the cognitive origin of people's understanding humorous utterances and the inference process of the pragmatic effects involved. It aims to verify the basic views of the embodied philosophy in the flesh to see if the philosophy in the flesh can really solve the problems that other theories cannot: What is the cognitive origin of people interpretation of words and how the interpreting process goes on?This thesis begins with Chapter One, which outlines the rationale, the purpose and significance of the present study, as well as the overall design of the thesis. Chapter Two gives a literature review of the dominant pragmatic theories and a critical analysis of the previous studies. Chapter Three provides the philosophical background of this research by elaborating on the three basic principles of the philosophy in the flesh. Chapter Four is data analysis. Chapter Five summarizes the current study, pointing out the original findings as well as its shortcomings, and offering some general views regarding studies of humor with a future line of research suggested.