Some of the locals shifted restlessly. He had another beer, walked outside, and his hors was back! He saddled up and started to ride out of town. The bartender wandered out of the bar and asked, “Say partner, before you go---what happened in Texas?” The cowboy turned back and said, “I had to walk home.”
In Example (23), the last word of the story will make you out of great surprise. From the cowboy’s behavior, readers might guess that he would appeal to arms to ask his horse back. His words sounded like a menace. The locals thought that the cowboy was extremely angry and he would shoot somebody dead if they didn’t give his horse back. Then at last the cowboy fooled the locals who would have teased the cowboy. The cowboy deliberately didn’t supply sufficient information. As a result his behavior made the locals misunderstand his words. Thus he raised a humorous effect and got his horse back with no difficulty.
2.3.3 Making criticism
In our lifetime, it is unavoidable that sometimes we have to criticize others to right a wrong or to reach an agreement. Nevertheless, being more tactful, or in another word, more humorous when we criticize, usually we can help ourselves achieve better effects without annoying people a lot. People are more likely to accept humorous criticism or criticism with goodwill.
(24) “Honey,” said the husband to his wife, “I invited a friend home for supper.”
“What? Are you crazy? The house is in a mess, I haven’t been shopping, all the dishes are dirty, and I don’t feel like cooking a fancy meal!”
“I know all that.”
“Then why did you invite a friend for supper?”
“The poor fool’s thinking about getting married.”
In Example (24), when one reads the last reply of the husband, he probably doesn’t see any connection between it and the question---”Why did you invite a friend for supper?” However, if people connect what the wife’s worries about, they can easily imagine their state of marriage life---apparently not satisfying at all, at least to the husband. People can imagine he may have tried to persuade his friend not to think about marriage but failed. So he plans to let his friend to have a look at the real situation of being married. Maybe we can consider the reply as a complaint to his wife and his marriage in an indirect way by introducing humor.
(25) The tired store clerk had pulled down blanket after blanket until only one was left on the shelf. Then the customer remarked, “I don't really want to buy today, I am only looking for a friend.” “Well, Madam,” said the clerk, “I'll take down the last one if you think he's in it.”
The clerk in this conversation gets a little angry with the customer since he/she looked at nearly every blanket and wasted the clerk so much time but in fact he/she has no intention to buy anything. Therefore, the clerk took an ironic way and said something impossible, which is easy for one to decode the clerk’s answer and sense the humor. Here, the clerk used such a humorous way to express his/her discontent and at the same time to avoid impoliteness.
2.3.4 Aesthetic function
Generally speaking, the normal verbal communication aims to make the addressees obtain some information. However, for humorous utterance, it does not only provide some information, but also create some interesting aesthetic feeling; that is to say, it is not only intellectual, but also perceptual. As I have mentioned above, the functions of humorous expression are to clam one’s feeling, create a comfortable environment and eliminate embarrassment, and sometimes it only aims to make fun. To do so, many humorous were carried by some forms, which create an aesthetic effect. Such as the following examples:
(26) “What’s the difference between a solider and a young girl?”
“One powders the face, and the other faces the powder.”
In this joke, the word “powder” can be a verb and a noun. The first one is a verb which means “to put powder on”, while the second one is a noun which means “gunpowder”. For this, of course, this joke will win the readers smile. And another butt of this humor is the structure of the compound sentence in which the two clauses contain the same words. In fact, this is just a word game played by the humorous master. Obviously, the clever reader can sense the aesthetic feeling from it.
3 Significance of the pragmatic analysis of English humor
Humor is a kind of flexible language phenomenon. It reflects a nation’s characteristics as well as the internal rules of languages. In the past, many scholars did research on humor from different perspectives, which shows that humor plays an important role in people’s communication. Humor might assist the conversation to go smoothly, or attributes to the avoidance of embarrassment. It’s very meaningful and instructive to analyze how humor is realized. And there are various theories brought forward to explain the English humor. Sometimes they cannot give the reasonable explanations for all the humors. However, according to the analysis in the previous sections, we can find that in the field of pragmatic, there are various theories that can be used to explain humor, for example, the speech act theory, the co-operative principle, the politeness principle, etc. With the help of these theories, we can analysis the English humor effectively.转贴于 酷文网-论文下载中心 http://www.coolwen.net
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