Contrastive Analysis of Chinese and Western Verbal Humor

Verbal humors are indispensable parts of culture. Researchers have analyzed the differences from cross-cultural perspective, few have considered their similarities. This thesis analyzes the similarities between Chinese and Western verbal humors from the fuzzy speech, fuzzy meaning, fuzzy sentence semantics and further compares differences regarding topics, objects, expressing styles and occasions. From these perspectives, this thesis explores the culture reasons from attitudes towards hierarchy and life philosophies. Thus, the similarities and differences between Chinese and Western verbal humors can promote the understanding of the other culture, as well as improve the cross-cultural awareness for effective communication.

A Study of Verbal Humor in Public Speech from the Perspective of Relevance Theory and Cooperative Principle--Taking TED Talks as An Example

Verbal humor carries rich cultural connotation and reflects the wisdom,communicative skills of the humor maker.There are many researches on verbal humor both at home and abroad,especially in the fields of sitcoms and literature from the perspective of pragmatics and cognitive linguistics.However,the researches on the humorous corpus of public speech are limited.This paper intendsto use qualitative research methods to explore the mechanism of verbal humor generation under the theoretical framework of cooperative principle and relevance theory.Through the analysis in the paper,it points out that verbal humor can be produced by violating the cooperative principle,the gap between maximum relevance and optimal relevance,and the speaker’s expanding contextual reasoning.The cooperation principle and relevance theory have a good elaboration on humor in public speeches,but both have their own deficiencies in explanatory power.Only the combination of those two theories can better explain the generation mechanism of verbal humor.

A Study of Verbal Humor of Undergraduates from the Perspective of Co⁃operative Principle and Relevance Theory

Verbal humor has been widely studied from the perspective of the Cooperative Principle.The verbal humor of undergrad⁃uates,however,hasn’t been studied thoroughly.Corpus of verbal humor of undergraduates will be analyzed from the perspective of the Cooperative Principle and Relevance Theory.The analyses show that the pragmatic analysis of the verbal humor of the under⁃graduates can reveal humorous effects,which play an important role in their daily communication.

An Analysis of Verbal Humor in the Dialogues of the American Sitcom The Big Bang Theory from the Perspective of Relevance Theory

Abstract:Humor,as an art of language,reflects the wisdom of the speaker and positive attitude towards life,and brings joy to both speaker and listener.Based on relevance theory of Sperber and Wilson,this paper analyzes the verbal humor in the Dialogues of the American sitcom The Big Bang Theory from the perspective of cognitive pragmatics,selects 5 specific cases of verbal humor to probe into its generation process and expression effects.The research is significant to the discovery of humor,application of relevance theory and research in pragmatics.It studies the generation process and expression effect to help people better understand humor in daily life,improve the ability of applying humor and feel the artistic charm of language.Meanwhile,the research provides a latest corpus to help English lovers and learners with their English language proficiency.