A Pragmatic Analysis Of Humor In Cell Phone Messages From The Perspective Of Presupposition

With the progress of technology, cell phone has become one of the vital tools for human communication in the daily life. Among all the functions of cell phone, short text messages have their unique characteristics. They are favored by people for their advantages like low price, high speed, high degree of privacy and availability to be read again any time if wanted or needed. As one kind of cell phone messages, humorous cell phone messages can bring people the feeling of joyfulness in addition to transmitting information.Humorous language is a fruit of human intelligence, which aims to achieve the effect of being amusing. As one type of humorous language, humorous cell phone messages have already turned a common phenomenon as cell phone is becoming more and more popular. The mechanism of humor in language is complex. A plenty of scholars in various fields have made great efforts in studying humor, for example, philosophers, rhetoricians, psychologists, sociologists and so on. Their endeavors have yielded a lot of achievements. Although many linguists have studied humor from the perspective of presupposition, few have analyzed it from the angle of pragmatic presupposition. Even fewer are the scholars studying humor in cell phone messages with the theory of pragmatic presupposition as the theoretical framework.Based on previous researches of humor, this paper makes an attempt to explore humor in cell phone messages from the perspective of pragmatic presupposition and uses qualitative analysis as the research method. The concept of pragmatic presupposition, types of pragmatic presupposition triggers and the traits of pragmatic presupposition will be explained at length in this thesis. Then, based on the knowledge of them, detailed analyses will be made of some humorous cell phone messages selected from a number of American websites. During the analyses, the author will firstly find out the pragmatic presuppositions in the selected humorous cell phone messages triggered by dissimilar presupposition triggers. After that, the relations between features of pragmatic presupposition and the successful conveyance of humor effects in those messages will be further probed into.Through research, the author finds that pragmatic presupposition is the speaker’s presupposition, which relates the meaning of sentences to contexts closely. There are altogether three categories of pragmatic presuppositions triggers:lexical presupposition triggers, syntactic presupposition triggers and phonetic presupposition triggers. Of the three kinds of presupposition triggers, the last one is more likely to be embodied in oral texts while the former two kinds can be easily found in written texts. The most commonly used lexical presupposition triggers are definite descriptions, factual verbs, implicative verbs, change-of-state verbs, interatives and verbs of judging. Syntactic presupposition triggers mainly include structures and expressions indicating comparison, cleft sentences, adverbial clauses of time, non-restrictive attributive clauses, counterfactual conditionals and questions. The five traits of pragmatic presupposition are appropriateness, common ground, defeasibility, subjectivity and latency. Of the five features, appropriateness is a precondition for successful conveyance of humor effects of cell phone messages. Common ground is the guarantee for the successful conveyance of cell phone messages’humor effects. Defeasibility is the urge. But subjectivity has a negative effect on the successful conveyance of humor in cell phone messages and latency makes the language of cell phone messages terse.It is hoped that this study can find out the real reasons for the humor effects in cell phone messages, deepen the understanding of humorous cell phone messages as well as broaden the vision of humor studies.