英语幽默的语用研究(英文)

Abstract: As a language phenomenon, humor plays an important role in English culture. It comes from our daily life while to some degree it exceeds life. Humorous language is often in the form of conversations in life and thus it has distinctive pragmatic characteristics. This paper comprehensively studies the English humor, especially its creation, features and social functions, from the point of pragmatic view in order to make the readers have an overall understanding of the English humor. Thus, humor can be better interpreted and used. Nowadays, cross-cultural communication is becoming more and more frequent, and therefore, it is necessary for us to learn something about English humor in order to make the communication more harmonious by adequately understanding and well employing the humor.

Key words:  English humor; Pragmatic; Features; Functions

摘要：幽默,作为一种语言现象在英语文化中有着举足轻重的作用。它源于生活又高于生活,常会以生活的会话形式出现。这就使它带有鲜明的语用特征。本文从语用学的角度对幽默的产生及其特征和社会功能，旨在让人们对英语幽默有一个全面的认识, 进而更好地理解幽默、运用幽默。在跨文化交际的今天，了解一些有关英语幽默的知识，在对外交流时充分地理解和运用幽默，能够促进交流的顺畅发展，从而获得交流的理想效果。

关键词：英语幽默; 语用学; 特征; 功能

Introduction
Humor, is a kind of language form that people create to look for ideal social intercourse effect. It is a widely existent language phenomenon all over the world. It is an art of speech, and is an aesthetic feeling and a language causing smile. Humor emerged in a kind of special language phenomenon in its special way. In our daily life, people make use of a humor to coordinate social interaction. Taking a general view of the linguistic researches on humorous speeches, the scholars studied this language phenomenon from different perspectives, such as rhetoric, semantics, pragmatics, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics and cognitive linguistics. As a kind of utterance art, humor is based not only on the linguistic internal rules but also on the use of speech in a special context which is the object of pragmatic study. In the following passage, the author will try to make a special analysis about the English humor from the pragmatic view hoping to benefit the readers’ cross-cultural communication.

1 A general view of pragmatics
To analyze the pragmatic characteristics reflected in English humor as well as humorous effects achieved with them, it’s necessary to have a general review of pragmatics. In this section, the author will mainly introduce the pragmatics’ definition and some pragmatics concepts and theories concerned.
1. 1 Definition of pragmatics
Pragmatics is a new branch of study in the area of linguistics; its development and establishment in the 1960s and 1970s resulted mainly from the expansion of the study of linguistics. It can be defined in various ways. A general definition is that it is the study of how speakers of a language use sentences to effect communication. In another word, it studies how people comprehend and produce a communicative act or a speech act in a conversation. It deals with how language users mean by different signs in different speech events or contexts. Pragmatics is concerned about those dynamic or contextual or non-conventional meanings of words and sentences articulated by language users.