Vague Rhetoric In English Humor

As a human phenomenon, humor permeates every aspect of life, and performs a variety of functions: social, cultural, cognitive, or psychological. For its social functions, for instance, humor plays an important role similar to those of etiquette: to foster consensus, to control conflicts, to escape a hard situation and to help maintain and harmonize the social order. In the contemporary world, a sense of humor is widely viewed as a highly desirable personality and is regarded as a unique aesthetic attitude of the individual.The study on humor can even be traced back to Plato and Aristotle period. Since then, many researchers and scholars have tried to analyze humorous language from various perspectives, such as psychology, sociology, cognition, philosophy. This paper makes an attempt at exploring English humor from a new perspective: vague rhetoric.American scholar L. A. Zadeh proposed the famous Fuzzy Set Theory in 1960s, which drew many scholars' attention to the study of vague phenomena in language. As a result, a new subject arose—vague linguistics. Taking uncertainty in language as its study object, vague linguistics makes people realize that vagueness is an intrinsic attribute of language and the proper use of vague expressions will greatly improve people' s communicative effects. When the rich achievement of vague linguistics study is combined with modern rhetoric, a new branch is formed. Vague rhetoric aims at studying the vague phenomena produced in communication, as well as how to improve expressive effects in human communication.With the Fuzzy Set Theory as the theoretical foundation, this thesis focuses its study on the vague rhetoric in English humor. It firstly reviews the study on humor, the phenomenon of vagueness in language and vague rhetoric. Then this paper presents the devices of vague rhetoric in English humor from phonetic, lexical, syntactical and traditional rhetorical devices perspectives. After that this paper goes on to analyze the working mechanism of vague rhetoric in humor, illustrating that during the process of transmitting information vagueness of humor is set up in the process of encoding and the vague veil of humor is removed in the process of decoding. Next, this paper furthers its study by demonstrating the pragmatic functions of vague humor, i.e., conveying implicatures, showing politeness to others, self-protection, and enforcing one' s message. This paper concludes its study with a brief summary of the study, in which the major findings, limitations and implications of the present study are pointed out.