Verbal Humor And Conversational Implicature-A Case Study Of HongLouMeng And Its Two English Versions

Humor can be seen everywhere in our daily life. It achieves the purpose of laugh-making and entertainment by skillful use of language especially rhetorical devices. In this sense, rhetorical devices actually act as effective humor vehicles. Meanwhile, they can lead to conversational implicature through maxim violation or mixed maxim violation. In English and Chinese some rhetorical devices are shared as humor vehicles.The classical literary works Hong LouMeng has been well received since its birth. It has two complete English versions, The Dream of Red Mansions, translated by Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang,and The Story of the Stone, translated by David Hawkes and John Minford. Since the birth of these two versions, papers on contrast research and translation have flooded. Hong Lou Meng is rich in verbal humor, which were designed by Cao Xueqin to ingeniously depict the character's personality and show their inner world. However, up to now, there is rare research on these verbal humor of the source text and two English versions from the perspective of conversational implicature.In this thesis, H.P. Grice's Cooperative Principle is highlighted while combined with Leech's Politeness Principle and Brown and Levinson's Face Theory to expound conversational implicature. They all can serve very well as the theoretical framework and tool for analyzing very convincingly conversational implicature. With the supplement of Politeness Principle and Face Theory, conversational implicature is so far the most effective pragmatic theory for the analysis of generating verbal humor although it receives dissenting opinions from pragmatic academia.With rhetorical devices which trigger humor as linguistic markers, humor data are extracted from the conversations in the first 80 chapters of HLM, so are the equivalents in two English versions. The data from the original and the English versions are put in line to construct a database. Through analyzing and contrasting the data to answer the following questions, (1) whether the humorous effect is reproduced in the two versions; (2) whether the conversational implicature is conveyed in the two versions; (3) whether humor translation can be improved under the direction of conversational implicature.Being an attempt in humor research, this thesis certainly contains some drawbacks and is open to comments and further research.