文 献 综 述

Literature review

2.1 Definition of Humor

Humor, specific to human beings, is the seasoning of our daily life and an indispensable part of human speech. It not only plays an important role in the improvement of the interpersonal relationships in social activities of many kinds, but also becomes the symbol of personal wit, glamour and education. For a long time, humor has attracted the attention and interest of scholars in many fields. The researches can range from traditional fields such as psychology, physiology and philosophy to broader ones such as anthropology, pedagogy, aesthetics, sociology, etc. With the rapid development of linguistics, pragmatics provides a new perspective for humor studies.

Verbal humor can serve people#8217;s psychological, emotional, social and communicative needs. A good understanding of the meaning and working mechanism of humors will contribute to the effective foreign language teaching. In addition, it helps a lot in the social and interpersonal communication.

2.2 Definition of pragmatic failure

Pragmatic failure does not mean that the language used in the word or the sentence is wrong, but the mistake of the speaker is inappropriate, or the way of speaking is wrong, and the expression is not accustomed. The severity of pragmatic failures is much greater than the errors of language use. In the process of communication, grammatical and phonetic errors can be easily perceived by the speaker from the surface structure of the language, the complainant often blames it to speaker's lack of knowledge of the language, this is understandable. But if a person who speaks fluent foreign language has a pragmatic failure in an unfavorable occasion, or in an inappropriate way, said inappropriate, may cause the audience misunderstand to him, or think that the speaker lacks education, Which leads to a unpleasant or serious consequences.

Pragmatics is a new discipline that studies specific discourses in specific situations and studies how to understand and use language through the context. And the production of humorous works requires a specific premise, such as the same humor at different times, people or places will produce different effects, Its understanding needs to be based on the reasoning of its discourse and context. Therefore, the relationship between pragmatics and humor is the relationship between scientific theory and research object, so there is a commonality between them and they can be compared with each other.