预设的可撤销性与幽默生成——以美剧《好汉两个半》为例

Presupposition's Defeasibility and Humor Generation——A Case Study of the Sitcom Two and a Half Men

情景喜剧因为其诙谐幽默的言语而广受人们的喜爱。本文运用预设理论,对《好汉两个半》中的语料进行分析后发现:预设的可撤销性是情景喜剧幽默效果产生的重要语言手段之一;预设与背景知识、会话含义、篇内语境或句内语境之间的矛盾都会导致预设的消失。取消预设策略的使用可以很好地解释《好汉两个半》言语幽默产生的语用机制。

Sitcoms are popular among the people worldwide for its abundant verbal humor. This paper tries to employ pragmatic presupposition to analyze the verbal humor in Two and a Half Men. The study finds out that presupposition defeasibility is one of the most important linguistic means to create humorous effect;presupposition can be cancelled by the contradiction between presupposition and background assumptions,conversational implications, discourse contexts and intrasentential contexts. Presupposition cancellation strategy can effectively interpret the mechanism of humor production.