On Offensive Pragmatic Strategies Of Impolite Humor

Humor is a commonly existing verbal phenomenon in human society.The utilization of humor in communication can enliven atmosphere,convey meaning and promote interpersonal harmony.The existing researches on humor in the field of pragmatics mainly concern what kind of pragmatic principles are violated by words to create the phenomenon of incongruity and few kinds of them are conducted from the perspective of impoliteness.Furthermore,researches on the pragmatic mechanism are comparatively rare on how speaker achieves humor through impolite utterances.By analyzing the representative views of Brown & Levinson(1987),Leech(1989,2014),Culpeper(1996,2011),and Bousfield(2003,2008),this thesis finds that a large number of impolite phenomena existing in humor and that impolite humor(IH henceforth)is a jocular process on the basis of attacking face.This thesis mainly focuses on the following three research questions: 1)How are offensive pragmatic strategies(OPS)of IH classified in The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon(The Tonight Show)? 2)How are different types of OPS distributed in IH? 3)What are the pragmatic functions of each type of OPS?The Tonight Show is a television talk show with a long history in U.S.,whose host Jimmy has a humorous and witty style and receives audiences’ favor for decades.Jimmy is famous for wit to create excellent IH effect in conversation,so his IH in the program is suitable to be selected as the research material of this thesis.Firstly,by making use of the qualitative method this thesis collects the host’s 200 cases of IH in the show from 2020 to 2021 and builds a mini-corpus2.To explicate the offensive pragmatic strategies of IH,this thesis adopts MAXQDA 2020 software,finds two new pragmatic strategies,i.e.,“negative evaluation” and “disparagement” and incorporates them into the original OPS framework of Bousfield(2008)and builds a new framework consisting of 15 pragmatic strategies.Secondly,basing on “General Strategy of Impoliteness” of Leech(2014),this thesis explores features of 15 kinds of OPS and then classifies them into 6categories:(i)Non Approbation;(ii)Non Generosity;(iii)Non Agreement;(iv)Non Sympathy;(v)Non Modesty;(vi)Non Tact.This thesis adopts pragmatic function research of Culpeper(2011),i.e.,“entertainment function;coercive function;affective function”,to discuss the realization methods of 3pragmatic functions in IH,then puts forward 3 appropriate pragmatic functions towards IH: “sarcastic function;regulated communicative function;critical function”,and constitutes the relations between 6 pragmatic strategies and their corresponding 6 pragmatic functions.This thesis has certain theoretical value and practical significance.Theoretically,this thesis excavates new OPS from the perspective of impoliteness and expands OPS research of Bousfield.It discusses 6 pragmatic functions and 6 corresponding OPS to cast enlightenment on further research of IH.Practically,this thesis assists the readers to well comprehend OPS so that they can further use IH in interpersonal communication and achieve communication effects.It also helps the readers understand the regularity of humorous discourse and appreciate the language structure in experiencing humor.