Verbal Humor In The Ellen DeGeneres Show From The Perspective Of Conversational Implicature

Verbal humor,a kind of language art and a widespread language phenomenon,gradually plays an indispensable role in our life and bears cultural implications.Out of its practicability and pervasiveness,verbal humor has aroused keen interest of scholars.Although countless scholars at home and abroad have made extensive contribution to the study of verbal humor,especially in the area of literary works,rarely have scholars applied it into talk shows.Since the studies of verbal humor based on real scenes seem more reliable,analyzing the live talk shows becomes an optimal choice.The past years have witnessed an increasing prevalence of television talk show programs,among which the author finds the most representative one The Ellen DeGeneres Show.To ensure the accuracy of the study,all the examples are selected from The Ellen DeGeneres Show covering from 2013 to 2015.The thesis is a case study with a qualitative method of verbal humor in The Ellen DeGeneres Show from pragmatics,mainly focusing on conversational implicature.This paper differs from the majority of previous studies in that it not only explores the generation mechanism of verbal humor in The Ellen DeGeneres Show but also goes further to discuss the factors achieving humor effect.According to H.P Grice's theory,the author discovers that the violation of cooperative principle can generate conversational implicature,such as polite refusal,awkwardness avoiding and so on.Due to the limited space,the paper only focuses on one kind of conversational implicature: verbal humor which can be generated by violating the quantity maxim,violating the quality maxim,violating the relation maxim and violating the manner maxim.However,the host's action of generating verbal humor by violating cooperative principle can't always ensure the realization of humor effect in communication.Therefore,taking both the sender and receiver of verbal humor into consideration,the author goes further to figure out the factors achieving the humor effect,such as the host's pragmatic competence and the consideration of audience,hoping to promote the host's skills in verbal humor generation and remind the host to take more consideration of the audience in communication as well.The thesis paves the way for employing pragmatic theories in talk shows,providing some useful suggestions for people to understand the generation mechanism of verbal humor as well as the realization of humor effect in communication.