The Pragmatic Analysis of Humor
Abstract: As a language phenomenon, humor is pervasive in our daily life. It not only improves human relations, but also is the symbol of personal wit, charm and education. Therefore, more and more scholars in various fields are paying a lot of attention to it. This paper aims at analyzing humor from a pragmatic perspective, hoping to find some relations between pragmatic guidelines and humor as well as to help more people understand and appreciate humor. For this purpose, 3 major pragmatic theories, namely, Grice’s Cooperative Principle, Sperber and Wilson’s Relevance Theory and Austin and Searle’s Speech Act Theory are employed. This paper is divided into 3 parts: Part 1 is an introduction of the basic concepts on humor research as well as a brief introduction of three traditional theories and works on humor from the psychological, linguistic and sociological perspectives; part 2 is the main body of the paper, reviews 3 pragmatic theories related to humor, and with sample analysis illustrates the application of these pragmatic theories to humor; Part 3 is the concluding part, restates the general idea of this paper, and helps us gain a better understanding of the previous discussion.
Key Words: humor; cooperative principle; relevance theory; speech act theory
幽默的语用分析
摘 要：作为一种语言现象，幽默普遍存在于我们的日常生活中。它不仅增进了人们的关系，改善了交谈的气氛，也是个人智慧、魅力和所受教育的一种体现。因此，越来越多来自各领域的学者都给予幽默很多关注。本文试从语用学角度出发，运用语用学理论（Grice的合作原则，Sperber& Wilson的关联理论和Austin &Searle的言语行为理论）来分析幽默的特点，旨在探究幽默和一些语用规则的关系，以期对幽默有更好的理解和欣赏。本文分为三个部分：第一部分简要介绍了幽默的概念，研究幽默的三大传统理论以及在心理学、语言学、社会学等方面对幽默已有的研究；第二部分是本文的主体部分，简要回顾了三个与幽默相关的语言学理论并且通过一些幽默笑话案例来分析这些理论在幽默中的应用；第三部分总结全文，重述了本文的基本思想，以助于对之前所做讨论有更好的理解。
关键词：幽默；合作原则；关联理论；言语行为理论
CONTENTS
1. Introduction 1
1.1 Definitions of Humor 1
1.2 Previous Researches on Humor 2
2. A Pragmatic Analysis of Humor 4
2.1 The Cooperative Principle (CP) 4
2.1.1 A Brief Review of CP 4
2.1.2 Breach of Four Maxims in Humor 6
2.1.2.1 Violation of Maxim of Quantity 6
2.1.2.2 Violation of Maxim of Quality 7
2.1.2.3 Violation of Maxim of Relevance 8
2.1.2.4 Violation of Maxim of Manner 9
2.2 Relevance Theory 10
2.2.1 A Brief Review of the Relevance Theory 10
2.2.2 Humor and Relevance Theory 12
2.2.3 Sample Analysis of Humor on Relevance Theory 12
2.3 Speech Act Theory 14
2.3.1 A Brief Review of the Speech Act Theory 14
2.3.2 Sample Analysis of Humor on Speech Act Theory 15
3. Conclusion 16
Bibliography 19
