A Study Of Verbal Humor From The Perspective Of Cooperative Principle

Humor pervades our lives. It exists in almost every part of the world. We can find humorin daily conversations, on televisions, in newspapers and so on. The studies of humor have along history and they can even be traced back to the embryonic period of modern civilization.As a kind of subject, humor attracts scholars’ attention from linguistics, literature, sociology,psychology, philosophy and so on. In the recent years, researches on humor in the field oflinguistics, especially in the branch of pragmatics, have come into fashion. So the thesis takesthe core theory in pragmatics, i.e. cooperative principle as the theoretical framework andqualitative research design is employed to make a systematic analysis of verbal humor causedby the conversational implicature in the film Three Idiots.Two research questions are to be explored in the thesis. Firstly, what does verbal humorfunction? Secondly, how is verbal humor achieved in movies?The thesis firstly mainly introduces the research background and objectives, themethodology in the research and the outlines of the thesis. In the second part, the definitionand classification of humor and three classical theories of humor are expounded. Besides, thecurrent studying situation in related fields at home and abroad is also illustrated. Afterregulating the theoretical framework, exploration about functions of verbal humor and ananalysis in the following chapter is made to analyze verbal humor between the specificcharacters in the film from the perspective of cooperative principle. At last, it is a conclusionthat states the major findings, significance, implications and limitations and offers somepractical suggestions on further researches.The findings are as follows: firstly, some specific functions can be achieved by verbalhumor: releasing emotions; displaying friendliness; resolving conflicts; showing aggression;creating educational background. Secondly, verbal humor in movies is mainly realized by theviolation of quantity, quality, relation and manner maxims in cooperative principle and what ismore, verbal humor may be caused by the violation of more than one maxim and somesub-maxims in the maxim overlap with each other.