Abstract
The current study tackles 20 humorous headlines from 10 selected English newspapers. Most of the previous studies focus on humor in literature and linguistic functions of the headlines in media. Very few of these studies tries to analyze humorous headlines in the English newspapers from either semantic or syntactic point of view. However, this study examines these headlines from semantic and pragmatic perspectives. Thus, it attempts to bridge the gap in literature of the thesis topic between certain linguistic functions of these headlines and their pragmatic functions. This can be achieved by identifying the semantic and pragmatic strategies and their manifestations in the data under investigation. The study aims at: providing a comprehensive analysis of the nature of humor in the English newspapers headlines by using semantic, as well as, pragmatic scripts, and giving an explanation of how the contextual factors play an important role in the understanding of the intended meaning of the humorous headlines.
The study introduces six hypotheses: (1) On the semantic level of this topic, the General Theory of Verbal Humor is a useful instrument for recognizing the humorous headlines of the selected English newspapers in terms of its six Knowledge Resources (KRs). (2) On its pragmatic level, Grice’s Conversational Implicature (CI) and Cooperative Principle (CP) Theory is a successful tool for the analysis of the selected humorous headlines. (3) The most frequent literary device used in the selected data is metaphor, whereas the least frequent one is joke. (4) The most frequent non-observant Grice’s Maxim is Quality. (5) Violation of Grice’s Maxims is more frequent than flouting these Maxims. (6) The writers of the humorous headlines sometimes observe Grice’s Maxims.
To achieve the aims and verify the hypotheses of this thesis, the study presents an eclectic model of two aspects, namely semantic and pragmatic. The first contains KRs that can serve as linguistic factors, manifesting the semantic functions of the humorous headlines. The second consists of certain maxims that are supposed to be flouted or violated by the writers, resulting in humorous headlines. A helpful statistical review for the frequency distribution of the literary devices and flouted/violated maxims is used to guarantee having scientific-based results of this analysis.
Based on the findings of this research, the study arrived at certain conclusions, among them are: (1) the semantic and pragmatic functions of the humorous headlines are liable to be verified due to the KRs of the GTVH and the Maxims of Grice’s CI and CP Theory. (2) The current study detects only two types of non-observance of Grice’s (1975) Maxims out of five: flouting and violation, which play an important role in creating the humorous effect on the target readers of the headlines in the English newspapers. (3) Violation occurs only in three headlines (4, 16 and 19) out of twenty. They are in The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and The New York Post, respectively.
On the other hand, all the hypotheses of the study are verified and found true, except that the second part of Hypothesis (3) and Hypothesis (5) are rejected. The study also answers the two questions of the thesis, and it ends with some recommendations and suggestions for further studies.
