A Study On Verbal Humor From The Perspective Of Neo-gricean Theory Of Conversational Implicature

Humor is a pervasive human phenomenon, a special manifestation of emotion, a quality display, and also the performance of intelligence. It comes from our daily life, while to some extent it goes beyond life. Scholars have investigated humor from different angles and in different disciplines. Researchers, since the ancient time, have laid great stress on humor study. Generally speaking, humor can be divided into several types, all of which are capable of amusing people in everyday life. However, there is still no one definition that could satisfy all those involved in the study of humor. In a broad sense, all those that are laughable, amusing, funny can be called humor.Humor often appears in the form of conversation, which is called verbal humor. In a real scenario, people usually misinterpret conversational implicature; therefore, pragmatic factors constitute an important reason for producing humor. And we could often see humorous conversations used in pragmatic analysis, which shows a close relationship between humor and pragmatics. Recently the rapid development of such basic disciplines as semantics, pragmatics and intercultural communication provided a fresher angle and wider view for the further study of humor.In essence, humor is achieved through people's communication which highly depends on pragmatics. Pragmatics mainly consists of Deixis, Conversational Implicature, Presupposition, Speech Acts and Relevance Theory. Recently, many researchers have made great efforts to study humor from the perspective of Conversational Implicature in Pragmatics; many scholars have made researches on humor from the perspective of Cooperative Principle. For example, Raskin and Attardo believed that the violating of the maxims in CP will lead to humor. But most of these achievements, particularly those from pragmatic perspective, remain quite superficial and scant. Therefore, the present paper tentatively collects humorous conversations from American real situation comedy Friends as research materials to study the underlying mechanisms of verbal humor within the framework of Neo-Gricean Theory.The present study offers a new perspective—Neo-Gricean Theory—to the study of verbal humor. The author intends to apply Neo-Gricean Theory, namely Levinson's Three Principles, Leech's Politeness Principle and Sperber & Wilson's Relevance Theory, to the analysis of the production and appreciation of verbal humor. This paper adopts quantitative analytical method, taking humorous conversations from American sitcom Friends as research materials to reveal the importance of verbal humor in cross-cultural communication and English teaching.In cross-culture communication, misunderstandings of verbal humor usually occur in that people with different cultures usually possess different living patterns, thinking patterns, customs, habits, rites and rituals and so forth. Due to the great differences between Chinese and American cultures, there exists the inaccessibility of certain culture-specific contextual assumptions. Thus, Chinese sometimes can not interpret the typical American humor. That is to say, Chinese can not get the pleasant surprise; consequently, they fail to appreciate the humor which the American intends to convey. How can we avoid humor appreciation failures of the English verbal humor? To address this question, this thesis employs contextual theories, especially the cultural context to expound the production and interpretation of humor effect in sitcoms.This thesis, apart from introduction and conclusion, basically, can be divided into four chapters:The first chapter is literature review. In this part, a revision of traditional humor theories and accomplishments of previous studies are demonstrated. To construct the theoretical basis for the whole research, the thesis first introduces three traditional theories of humor—the Superiority Theory, the Incongruity Theory and the Relief Theory. In this chapter, a detailed interpretation of humor is presented, including the origin, studies both at home and abroad and the present development of humor. At the end of this chapter, the author of this paper describes the modern development of humor theories.Chapter Two is the theoretical framework and research methodology of this thesis. The author of this paper initially describes the origin, development and contents of Gricean Theory, and then the limitations of Gricean Theory are comprehensively demonstrated. In complementing the deficiency of Gricean Theory, many linguists contributed to this laborious hard work and thus the Neo-Gricean Theory came out. While the most influential components in Neo-Gricean Theory are Levinson's Three Principle, Leech's Politeness Principle and Sperber & Wilson's Relevance Theory. And research methodology is also demonstrated.Chapter Three is the body of the thesis, which focuses on the case analysis of humor. Humor generated by violating Levinson's three principles is discussed firstly, and the power of the Conversational Implicature in interpreting humor is also demonstrated with examples. And then, this chapter concentrates on Politeness Theory, showing its contributions to the understanding of humor with cases. And finally, case study of verbal humor by violating Relevance Theory is made.Chapter Four discusses the implications of humor for cross-cultural communication and English teaching and learning. The importance of verbal humor in cultural communication and language learning is displayed by combining cultural value and religion with cross-cultural communication. The author also points out the limitations and possibilities for further study.Then is the conclusion of the thesis. It is a whole summary and conclusion of this thesis. Besides, humor's social function in the communication can not be ignored.This is a tentative exploration on verbal humor based on Neo-Gricean Theory. Hopefully, it will attract more attention to this special field and improve English learners' interpretation of American sitcom; hence strengthen cross-cultural communication between America and China and facilitate the use of humor in communication.