A Comparative Study On Chinese And English Verbal Humors From The Pragmatic Perspective

As a particular feature of people’s talk in daily life, the humor widely exists in a unique art form in our communication system. From the point of the connotation of humor, it is not only a concept system that carries language, but also has the characteristics of culture. It becomes an independent school in the morphology of the language, containing rich meaning of connotative interpretation.From the microcosmic individual perspective, humor itself has reserved of thoughts, philosophy and the outlook on life and many other aspects of information unit of meaning. From macroscopical overall angle of view, humor also reflects the characteristics of a state and nation. Both the English and Chinese cultural systems contain rich connotations of history, culture, social customs, psychological characteristics and so on. Through the cultural research on English and Chinese humor, we can get a more comprehensive knowledge on the ground of Chinese culture and western culture."Humor" is one of indispensable part of the whole national cultural system. However, from the present research condition, the academic community has not formed a perfect system for humorous culture study. Studied on the existing researches, it is easily to discover the phenomenon that the humor studies are going through a historical dynamic process of development. It is from the original main rhetorical category gradually to the sociology, and anthropology in the direction of development. In the perspective of pragmatics research, field of humor research is no longer limited to the original semantics category, but becomes more extensive and has a rising stage of development. If we put our country’s theories with western humor studies in transverse contrast, we can see the apparent differences between the two systems. Namely, western theories have already gradually hastened on complete autonomy system such as superiority theory, release theory and incongruity theory, which are all the obvious achievements. Although China also has some fragmentary viewpoints like Lin Yutang, Lu Xun and other scholars, who have explained some valuable personal opinions, the body system of the study on humor is still mainly followed the western research achievement of the theories. Contemporary research theory achievement also is still on a relatively simple stage, and hasn’t established the Chinese humor system. Besides, the present researches are mainly about the mechanisms of production, comprehension and acquisition of humor. Theorists focused on the cognitive approach and tried to interpret humor from philosophical, psychological and psychoanalytic perspectives. Nevertheless, few researchers paid enough attention to the systematic functions of humor in its application.This thesis collected a large quantity of materials from the joke books and the Internet, and intended to make a multi-angled comparative research on humor in the frame of the pragmatics. Compare and contrast methods were employed in this research. At the beginning, the theories of presupposition, deixis and Cooperative Principle were used to explain the mechanism of humor production. Then the author analyzed the similarities between English and Chinese humor from the angles of written form and rhetorical devices. The differences of these two kinds of humor were studied from the perspectives of cultural and style differences. In the conclusion part, the author summarized these two kinds of humor and found their significant functions in application:releasing the depressed emotions, enhancing good relationships, resolving the embarrassments, criticizing and educating others.