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Vagueness, as an integral part of human language, has penetrated into our dailyconversations. We use vagueness to express ourselves without even noticing itsexistence. Because of its pervasiveness, vagueness can’t avoid appealing to scholarsfrom various research fields, such as philosophy, psychology, sociology, semanticsand pragmatics. Philosophers attempt to answer such questions as what’s the nature ofvagueness, is it good or bad, and how to exploit it properly. Psychologists argue that itis our vague mind that contributes to the vague language. Linguists study vaguenessin language use. In the past several decades, vague theories have been employed bymany linguists to analyze practical discourses, such as advertising, diplomaticlanguage and political issues, etc. Since the birth of pragmatics, which studieslanguage in dynamic use, many linguists find that vagueness is not confined to theliteral meaning of a single word, phrase or even the literal meaning of an utterance,but exists in our intentions expressed by certain utterances. Thus, the study ofvagueness is undertaken more dynamically rather than statically. It is Thomas (1995:195) who first used pragmatic ambivalence to refer to the indefinite or indirectexpressions speakers use in a particular context in order to convey severalillocutionary forces to hearers at the same time. Pragmatic ambivalence is widelyexploited in our everyday conversations. The main reason for people to exploitpragmatic ambivalence is to obtain some communicative advantage. Pragmaticambivalence has a strong explanatory power as it studies the underlying intentions ofthe utterances produced by the conversational participants. At home and abroad, manyresearches have been done using pragmatic ambivalence to analyze the dynamicconversations in dramas, novels, political debates, interviews, etc. These analyseshelp us to attain a better understanding of the personalities of various characters andmore importantly the underlying illocutionary goals intended by the speakers.As we know, humor is mainly produced through the use of language, andpragmatic ambivalence can occur in conversations and serves the purpose of makingthe speech more interesting. Furthermore, pragmatic ambivalence is based on contextswhich also play an important role in eliciting humor. Thus we may surmise that humor,to a certain degree, is interrelated with pragmatic ambivalence. However fewresearches have been done to testify this. Therefore, in this thesis, we attempt toexplore if humor can be produced through pragmatic ambivalence and how this isachieved.Humor is pervasive in our daily conversations and various theories are putforward to explain the nature of humor and how verbal humor is generated. As amatter of fact, humor is the joint product of various factors working together. In thisthesis, we focus our attention on one possible factor, i.e. pragmatic ambivalence, tosee if its employment can generate humor.Thus, this thesis is of both theoretical and practical significance. First andforemost, pragmatic ambivalence is taken as the theoretical basis to conduct a detailedanalysis of humorous utterances in Friends so as to reveal the correlation betweenhumor and pragmatic ambivalence. However, the previous studies on humor haven’tmade such attempts. Secondly, it would help people to understand and appreciatehumor utterances more easily. <本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。