Contrastive Analysis Of Pragmatic Vagueness In English And Chinese Verbal Humor

Since ancient Greece, the phenomenon of vagueness that is considered as the essenceof pragmatics has attracted much attention among philosophers, psychologists, mathematics,linguists, etc. According to Sperber&Wilson (1986a,1995) and He Ziran (2000), they holdthat talks in people’s daily communication cover literal talk, loose talk and metaphoricaltalk. In people’s daily social interaction, apart from a small number of conversations thatrequire literal understanding, the rest of them are often loose and casual, more or less, theyare related to pragmatic vagueness.In terms of the connection between pragmatic vagueness and verbal humor, domesticresearchers, like Wu Yong (2006), Xi Xiaoqing (2005), Zhang Dongmei (2007), HanCaiyun (2010) and Dai Qiuya (2010), have once explained it from the perspectives of fuzzytheory, cognition and pragmatics, fuzzy linguistics, vague theory or pragmatic vagueness,receiving valuable findings. Based on the previous study on pragmatic vagueness andverbal humor, the thesis aims to adopt the qualitative research to contrastively analyze theconversations picked randomly from American sitcom the Big Bang Theory and Chinesesitcom Ipartment from the perspective of pragmatic vagueness, in particular, the nine typesof it, namely, approximation, fuzziness, generality, ambiguity, ambivalence, metaphor,meiosis, irony and hyperbole. Three questions are to be solved in the present thesis: firstly,can all the nine types of pragmatic vagueness bring humor in both English and Chinesesitcoms? Secondly, what are the generative devices of pragmatic vagueness in English andChinese verbal humor? Thirdly, what are the similarities and differences of pragmaticvagueness in English and Chinese verbal humor?The present research has got three main findings: to start with, the nine types ofpragmatic vagueness really exist in both English and Chinese and they can reach humorouseffects in sitcoms. Secondly, pragmatic vagueness mainly takes the devices of vagueness inpolysemy, hyponymy, syntax, rhetorical devices and phonetic symbols to generate humor inEnglish and Chinese verbal utterances. Lastly, the similarities of pragmatic vaguenessbetween English and Chinese verbal humor include the techniques applied and thefunctions of pragmatic vagueness in English and Chinese verbal humor; while pragmaticvagueness in English and Chinese verbal humor have differences in topic, target, occasion,forms of expression and types of humor. The thesis is made up of six chapters. The first chapter is the introduction, includingthe research purpose and questions, research significance, methodology, research data andoutline of the thesis. The second chapter is the theoretical framework, which makes areview on the definition, classification and functions of humor together with the previousresearches concerning vagueness and pragmatic vagueness at home and abroad. The third,fourth and fifth chapters are the main parts of the thesis, the author first analyzes verbalhumor in American sitcom the Big Bang Theory and Chinese sitcom Ipartment from thenine types of pragmatic vagueness, which aims to solve the first research question of thethesis. Then, the author picks humorous utterances randomly from the two sitcoms toanalyze and summarizes the generative devices of pragmatic vagueness in English andChinese verbal humor. At last, a contrastive analysis is carried out to find out thesimilarities and differences of pragmatic vagueness between English and Chinese verbalhumor. The sixth chapter gives the main findings, limitations and suggestions of theresearch.