Abstract

People have gradually realized that humor actually is indispensable for our monotonous and regular life with the development of social civilization. The most common type is humorous conversations. In many pragmatics books, lots of humorous conversations can be found which are employed to analyze pragmatics. So we can see that humor and pragmatics are closely connected. However, papers about humorous language with a pragmatic view are comparatively only a few. Besides, most of them only focus on certain aspects of pragmatics, for example, cooperative principle. Based on the main parts of pragmatics, this paper does a comparatively detailed research on humorous language in English conversations. At the beginning of the thesis, some popular definitions of humor are compared and a conclusion is made. Then humor is classified and its functions in the social interaction are specified. Thereafter, main aspects of pragmatics are generally introduced, which serve as a foundation for the following analysis. In the core part of this thesis, plenty of humorous conversations are used as examples, and their pragmatic effects are analyzed one by one. Moreover, this paper also discusses the relationship between cooperative principle and politeness principle, and other pragmatic characteristics such as speech act, deixis etc.

Key words: English Humor, Conversational Meaning, Cooperative Principle, Humorous Effects

摘要

随着社会文明的发展，人们越来越感受到幽默为原本单调繁复的生活注入一股新鲜的活力，以会话形式出现在我们身边的幽默语言最为常见。在许多语用学著作中，我们可以看到许多幽默会话被用来作为语用分析的例子，可见幽默和语用学有着密切的关系。但是专门用语用学分析幽默语言的著作却并不多。而且这些著作大都就语用学某个方面进行分析。本文再结合语用学几个主要方面的基础上，对英语会话中的幽默言语进行了较为详细的分析研究。论文的开头先对当前幽默进行了比较和总结，然后根据幽默的功能将其分类，最后概括了幽默在社会交往中的作用。这一部分体现了从语用角度分析幽默语言特别是会话式幽默的必要性及科学性。随后，文章在核心章节，采用了大量包含有幽默效果的会话例子，并逐一用语言学的观点分析。其中，又将会话含义的产生在幽默语言中发挥的作用作为重点分析对象。此外，本文还特别分析了合作原则和礼貌原则之间的关系，以及语用特征即语用学的其他方面，如礼貌原则， 言语行为等。

关键词：英语幽默，会话含义，合作原则，幽默效果