Humour, Speaker’s Intention, And Hearer’s Failure To Recognize

Humour, as a multifunctional factor in human communication, has attractedattention from various fields and has been examined from a number of perspectives.Recent years have witnessed an increase in the number of studies on humour in thebroad field of linguistics, especially pragmatics, which mainly endeavours toaccount for the mechanisms of humour production and/or interpretation within theframework of Cooperative Principle or Relevance Theory. Studies from theperspective of CP conclude that humour generates by violating the four maximswhile those from the perspective of RT find that humour understanding is a searchfor relevance. Speaker’s intention is a pivotal notion in Grice’s theory of meaning,which claims that it is the speaker’s intention that decides the meaning of anutterance. Since verbal humour goes along with an utterance, speaker’s intentionwill, in one way or another, has something to do with the generation of humour.Therefore, this thesis is an attempt to discover the relationship between verbalhumour and speaker’s intention and ultimately to find out how speaker’s intentionfunctions in generating verbal humour and why, in some cases, the intended humourcannot be recognized by the hearer as expected.In order to answer these questions, I firstly collected some small jokes and seehow humour is produced in them. After examination, I found that what the speakersaid was not funny per se, it was the discrepancy appeared in the dialogue thatproduced humour. Through in-depth study, I’ve found four cases in which humour isgenerated because of discrepancy, which are the discrepancy between the hearer’sinterpretation and the speaker’s intention, the discrepancy between context andspeaker’s intention, the discrepancy between speaker’s informative intention and hiscommunicative intention, and the discrepancy between the speaker’s ground-floorbelief and the reality. On the other hand, I collected some jokes and utterances inAmerican sitcoms in which humour cannot be recognized, and tried to seek the causes. As a result, I’ve discovered three reasons why the hearer or the audiencecannot capture the humour as expected. They are the inadequacy of hearer’slinguistic competence, the inadequacy of hearer’s background knowledge, and theimpropriety of the context.