Analysis of principle of conversation humor in pragmatics

Abstract

Pragmatics is a main branch of linguistics, and with the development of pragmatic theory, many researchers have made deep researches from various angles on humor analysis and achieved fruitful results. While humor, as a talk-art, plays an important part in our daily life; it can not only please other people, but also adjust atmosphere, and improve interpersonal relationship with presenting speaker’s intelligence and charm. As a phenomenon of language, humor attracts many researchers’ attention in the field of linguistics. Because humor can not exist independently, there is a close relationship between itself and language rule. Therefore, this thesis discusses the principle of humor from the four cooperative principle (Relation, Quantity, Quality and Manner)and presupposition three characters(Mutual knowledge, Appropriateness and Defeasibility) through analyzing a series of verbal humor dialogue. In a word, from analysis in this thesis, we know it is an effective method to analyze humor from the cooperative principle and presupposition, and they two really have made a great contributions to analyzing the existence of humor. In fact, with these two theories, people can avoid many embarrassing situations by creating humor.