A Study Of Verbal Humor In Opuscula From The Perspective Of Pragmatic Presupposition

Humor is clever use of language in communication. It is cultured in wording, rich in meaningful and aesthetic value. It reflects the speaker's wit in smartly using language, as well as one's unusual experience and even one's wisdom of life. Humor is a verbal product under certain circumstance and the understanding of it cannot be achieved without considering the context in which it is uttered. Humor can't survive without the inherent rules of language, or be separate from the non-conventional application of those rules in specific community. Thereupon, humor is the practical using of linguistics and it can be analyzed with the help of pragmatics.As the carrier and representative of humor, CCTV's opuscula in Spring Festival Gala supply a rich data for pragmatic study of humor. This paper takes pragmatic presupposition theory as its theoretical frame and analyzes verbal humor in opuscula from both aspects of situation and language in which verbal humor occurred. It studies effects and mechanisms of verbal humor by means of both quantitative and qualitative analyses. It is found that the speakers and hearers in opuscula utilize the violation of two basic properties of pragmatic presupposition to achieve their aim of humorous effects: appropriateness and mutual knowledge. In the certain communication situation, the participants violate the appropriateness of pragmatic presupposition accidentally or intentionally from their own purposes. Their absence of mutual knowledge leads to the humorous ends as well as canceling mutual knowledge intentionally. Inspired by Wang Yueping's approaches in classifying pragmatic presupposition, the writer divides the manipulations of pragmatic presupposition in humor language into four types: contradicted presupposition, false presupposition, canceled presupposition and preserved presupposition.Two findings are concluded on the functions of verbal humor in opuscula. First, verbal humor leads to two kinds of effects from the view of the speaker: self-disparagement and disparaging others. The manipulations of canceled presupposition and preserved presupposition in utterances result in self-disparagement, while contradicted presupposition and false presupposition result in disparaging others. Second, the diachronic study on opuscula reflects some true pictures of realistic social development in China by taking a close look at verbal humors in three angles:language, culture and society. These implications can trigger TV viewers'in-depth reflections. This study attempts to present another perspective in verbal humor in opuscula based on previous studies of other scholars on pragmatic presupposition.