Cooperative Principle and English Humorous Utterance

Humorous utterances,especially those in the form of conversation in life,have distinctive pragmatic features.There is a close relationship between humor and pragmatics,which can be found in various books on pragmatics.In those books,humorous utterances function as examples for pragmatic analysis.Effective humorous languages often reflect one or several pragmatic features.This paper specifically introduces one of the important theories of pragmatics:cooperative principle,by which the paper analyzes the humorous utterance and explores the relationship between pragmatic rules and humorous utterance.The purpose is to make people know humorous utterance is a matter of pragmatics. The reality of the humor especially depends on implication of the language and the context.