A Pragmatic Study Of Verbal Humor In Chinese

Humor has been enjoying popularity among the scholars of various fields all over theworld for a long time. With the rapid development of pragmatics, various pragmatic theoriesprovide new perspectives for humor studies. Domestic studies tend to explore how humorsachieve humorous effects on basis of pragmatic theories, such as cooperative principle,relevance theory and adaptation theory. Their supporting data is mainly collected frompopular sitcoms, cross-talks or short comedies in which conversations are created in advance.In the present thesis, speech act theory and politeness theory are used as the theoreticalframework to analyze verbal humors in Chinese which happen in relatively authentic contexts.Kangxi Comes is a popular TV talk show in our country. In this program, the hosts and theguests freely discuss things together with few restrictions. This program is chosen forcollecting verbal humors.10episodes are picked up from the program of2012, and318instances of humor are identified in all. This study intends to answer two research questions:(1) What are the illocutionary functions of the verbal humors in the data?(2) What are theperlocutionary effects of these verbal humors founded in the data?The data is sorted out based on their illocutionary functions and then the perlocutionaryeffects of these verbal humors are analyzed. The findings of this research are: firstly, theseverbal humors have three illocutionary functions. The conflictive function and the convivialfunction take up to94.3%of the data while the competitive function takes up only5.7%.Secondly, the analysis of the perlocutionary effect is done on two levels, the perlocutionarygoal and the actual effect. It is found that the application of verbal humors indicates thespeaker’s concern for the participants’ face needs, and generally there are five kinds ofperlocutionary goals. The actual effect is found to contain the verbal actual effect and thenonverbal actual effect. The verbal effect includes contributing more verbal humors, echoingthe words of the speaker, expressing sympathy and showing involvement. The nonverbalactual effect includes laughter, smiling and other physical reaction. These actual effects canappear alone or at the same time.