An Analysis of Cantonese Verbal Humor in Table for Six from the Perspective of Pragmatics

Abstract

Table for Six is a Hong Kong comedy movie released in 2022. With a box office of 77 million Hong Kong dollars, it won the historical championship of Hong Kong comedy films and was well-received by the public upon its release. It is a superb example of a “Dayo Wong-style movie” , with a ton of amazing Cantonese verbal humor. The cooperation principle, a crucial pragmatics theory, is used in this study along with qualitative research methodologies to investigate the mechanism of verbal humor production in the Cantonese setting. The article strategically selects four very representative character dialogues in the movie and conducts an in-depth analysis of them using the cooperative principle’s quantity maxim, quality maxim, relation maxim and manner maxim, further broadening the scope of linguistics research in the Cantonese context.