摘要

作为英语中一种特殊的语言现象，幽默在英语文化中起着十分重要的作用。它不仅担任着人际关系润滑剂的角色，而且是个人魅力的表现。对于我国的英语学习者来说，对英语幽默的理解和运用始终是英语学习中的一个瓶颈，如果打破这一瓶颈，将极大地提高英语学习者学习英语的兴趣，促进他们的英语学习。
   本文将运用会话含义理论对英语幽默进行分析。由于合作原则是会话含义理论中最重要的原则，所以本文将着重运用合作原则及其四个准则对英语幽默进行研究。本文主要研究方法为描述法和案例分析法。描述法主要用在理论方面，案例分析主要出现在运用会话含义理论对英语幽默的分析上。

关键字：幽默；会话含义；合作原则；违反

Abstract

As a special language phenomenon in English, humor plays a very important role in English culture. It not only acts as the lubricant in people’s relationship, but also shows one’s personal attractiveness. English humor is a bottleneck for Chinese English learners to understand and use during English learning. Chinese English learners’ interests will be stimulated if this barrier is broken.
This paper will use Conversational Implicature theory to analyze English humor. Cooperative principle is the most important principle in Conversational Implicature theory. The author will focus on using cooperative principle and its four maxims to do a research on English Humor. The main methods of this paper are Descriptive method and Case analysis. Descriptive method will be involved in this thesis mainly when describing Cooperative Principle (CP) as the theoretical basis. Case analysis will be used in the analyzing humor through conversational Implicature theory.

Key words: Humorous Utterance; Conversational Implicature; Cooperative Principle; Violation

1 Introduction

Humor is the discourse, action, or facial-expression which can amuse people in the process of their communication. Since people’s communication is realized in the discourse, humor is often appeared in everyday’s discourse. Its generation must draw support from the language and depends heavily on the context in which it is used. Generally speaking, pragmatics, as a new field in linguistics, studies how people interpret language and use it through contexts in communication. In resent years, there have been a large number of pragmatic studies of humor. Raskin put forward “Cooperative Principle in humor”; Attardo criticized that humor violates the cooperative Principle and said that humor violates at least one maxim in Cooperative Principle.