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Humor is a common phenomenon, which plays important roles in many aspects of our daily lives. Over thousands of years, humor has been extensively studied in many fields, such as psychology, physiology and philosophy, anthropology, and sociology. Until recently, it has been studied within the scope of linguistics. However, what is humor? The English term “humour” or “humor”, which derived from the Latin word for “liquid”, “fluid” or “moisture”. As times went by, the word “humor” lost its original meaning and came to be used in its present sense. As to the definition of humor, no agreement has been reached yet. Different people have different views and thus different interpretations came into being. Aristotle once defined humor as incongruity, anything ludicrous contains some defect or ugliness, which is not painful or destructive. Sigmund Frued thought that enjoyment from humor depended on the release of suppressed tendencies in humor behavior. Even some authoritative dictionaries define humor in different ways. In Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary of Current English, it is defined as: (1) capacity to cause or feel amusement (2) A person’s state of mind. In Longman Dictionary of English Language ＆Culture, it is defined as the ability to understand and enjoy what is funny and makes people laugh. Although the definitions are not completely the same, we still can find something in common: Firstly, there should be human participants in the act. The speaker and the hearer play an important role in the humorous utterance. Secondly, the occurrence of humor should refer to the ability of people who are capable of producing and receiving what is funny and laughable. Thirdly, in any case something must happen in a humor act, which refers to something people have seen, heard or thought. As to the classification of humor, Pocheplsov (1981) divided humor into two kinds. One is situational humor; the other is linguistic humor or verbal humor. Situational humor is situation-oriented, such as Monkeys mimic human beings’ behavior, and little babies learn to walk. Both of their awkward and vivid postures are situational humor. Verbal humor refers to text-oriented humor, both written and spoken. It is realized by languages. In this paper, the writer mainly talks about the verbal humor. Humor and jokes are two relative and distinctive concepts. The writer got the two definitions in the Oxford Illustrated English-Chinese Dictionary. Humor means the quality of being amusing or comic; the ability to perceive or express humor or take a joke, whereas jokes refer to a thing said or done to excite laughter; a ridiculous person or thing. From the definitions we can see that humor is a kind of quality. It’s abstract and invisible. Laughable or amusing seems to be the essence of humor. On the contrary, jokes are kind of words in possession of humorous characteristic, which are concrete and visible. To distinguish these two definitions better, the writer takes the following two examples: (1) (After dating for some months, the girl wants the boy to make a proposal for marriage. But the boy does not want to marry at present.) “Darling, I want to dance like this forever.” the girl said. “Don’t you ever want to improve?” the boy asked. (He, 2004: 166) (2) A boy goes to a pet shop to buy a parrot. There he sees a parrot with a red string tied to its left leg and a green string tied to its right leg. He asks the owner the significance of the string. “Well, this is a lightly trained parrot. If you pull the red string he speaks French, if you pull the green string he speaks German,” replies the shopkeeper. “And what happens if I pull both the strings?” the curious shopper inquiries surprisedly. “I fall of my perch, you fool!” screeches the parrot. (College English, 2002: 27) It’s obvious that the first example is a humorous story, while the second is a joke. Jokes can be purposely written for people’s enjoyment, which may or may not happen in reality, or be aroused unconsciously by people. By contrast, humor is often created on purpose. People deliberately adopt the humorous way to reach a certain purpose. 1.3 Research Questions and the Significance of the Thesis Since humor is an important part of a language, which exists in all kinds of human communication. There are quite a few reasons for choosing verbal humor as the objective of the present study. Firstly, studying on humor from pragmatic perspective can help us better know the production of humor. In this paper, the writer tries to study the following two questions: (1) whether are there more factors related to the production of humor besides incongruity that has been proved to be a working factor to elicit laughter? (2) Can we find more evidence in pragmatics for the realization and comprehension of humor besides some major principles and theories? Through reading some papers that people wrote on humor. The writer finds that most writers analyze verbal humor from the perspective of pragmatics and semantics. From pragmatic perspective, various theories have been used to explain humor, among them, the Speech Act Theory, the Relevance Theory, the Cooperative Principle, the Politeness Principle were mostly used. In this paper, the writer concludes more humorous examples which can be interpreted by these pragmatic theories mentioned above. One objective of the thesis will concentrate on how to understand humorous utterances with those pragmatic theories. Besides these principles, the writer wants to find whether there are other pragmatic contents that can be used to analyze the production of verbal humor. Finally, the study on the functions of humor may help us further understand the importance of humor, and how humor embodies a person’s competence of active use of language. The research method is to apply some of the major pragmatic theories, namely, Cooperative Principle, Speech Act Theory, Relevance Theory, and Politeness Principle to the analysis of what factors have an influence on the understanding of verbal humor. 1.4 The Organization of the Thesis Chapter One is an introductory chapter, which offers an overview of humor, its definition and classification. Two vague definitions will be distinguished. They are jokes and humor. Chapter Two is the literature review which reviews the three classical theories of humor including superiority, release, and incongruity and two modern linguistic studies of humor. Chapter Three illustrates the laugh-making mechanism from those aspects, including incongruity, cognitive and cultural factors, etc. Chapter Four and Five form the body of the thesis which analyze the production and comprehension of verbal humor by employing the pragmatic theories, and discuss some functions of verbal humor. The last chapter is conclusion, which summarizes the key ideas discussed in the thesis, and offers some suggestions for further study. 幽默是一钟很常见的现象，它存在于我们日常生活的各方各面。近千年以来，幽默已经广泛地被各种领域所涉猎，比如心理学，生理学，哲学，人类学和社会学等。近年来，幽默已经涉及到了语言学的领域了。但是，幽默到底是什么呢？英文单词“Humor”起源于拉丁词“Liquid”，“Fluid”，“Moisture”。随着时间的流逝，“幽默”这个词丧失了它原来的意思，开始以现在的意思为人们所用。说到幽默的定义，未能达成一致。不同的人有不同的观点,因此不同的解释都有。亚里士多德曾经幽默定义为不一致,任何可笑的包含一些缺陷或丑陋,这不是痛苦的或破坏性的。西格蒙德·操作认为享受幽默取决于释放抑制倾向的幽默行为。 本文来源：https://www.wddqw.com/doc/9fbfd99959eef8c75ebfb367.html