Abstract: As a language phenomenon, humor is pervasive in our daily life. It not only improves human relations, but also is the symbol of personal wit, charm and education. Therefore, more and more scholars in various fields are paying a lot of attention to it. This paper aims at analyzing humor from a pragmatic perspective, hoping to find some relations between pragmatic guidelines and humor as well as to help more people understand and appreciate humor. For this purpose, 3 major pragmatic theories, namely, Grice’s Cooperative Principle, Sperber and Wilson’s Relevance Theory and Austin and Searle’s Speech Act Theory are employed. This paper is divided into 3 parts: Part 1 is an introduction of the basic concepts on humor research as well as a brief introduction of three traditional theories and works on humor from the psychological, linguistic and sociological perspectives; part 2 is the main body of the paper, reviews 3 pragmatic theories related to humor, and with sample analysis illustrates the application of these pragmatic theories to humor; Part 3 is the concluding part, restates the general idea of this paper, and helps us gain a better understanding of the previous discussion.
Key Words: humor; cooperative principle; relevance theory; speech act theory
