中美情景喜剧幽默对白的语用学分析——以《家有儿女》和《成长的烦恼》为例 .aspx

中南民族大学

硕士学位论文

中美情景喜剧幽默对白的语用学分析——以《家有儿女》和《

成长的烦恼》为例

姓名：苏莉杰

申请学位级别：硕士

专业：外国语言学及应用语言学

指导教师：许菊

20090501

A Pragmatic Analysis of Verbal Humors in Chinese and American Sitcoms

Abstract

Humor is “something causing you to smile or laugh” or “the quality of causing such amusement”. It is a popular pragmatic phenomenon because it can fulfill a lot of psychological, affective, cognitive, social or aesthetic functions. Humor has constantly been a hot topic in philosophical and linguistic fields. Among the western classical humor theories, superiority theory, relief theory and incongruity theory are the most typical ones, which interpret humor respectively in terms of the relative status between the humorist and the subject being laughed at, the psychological-affective function of humor, and the cause of humor creation. In China, Lin Yutang was one of pioneers in the field of humor studies. Many more recent researches have studied humor from linguistic, rhetorical and pragmatic perspectives.

Sitcom (short for situation comedy) is a humorous drama based on the situation that might arise in everyday life. To make the audience laugh is one of the most essential ingredients and the ultimate goal of sitcoms. Nowadays sitcom has been established as a mature comic literary genre and part of the staple diet of mainstream television entertainment around the world. Among the American and Chinese sitcoms, Growing Pains and Home with Kids are the most popular ones, both of which are developed in a family setting with loving parents and lovely kids of different characters. Sitcom is a relatively new literary and television genre, so its researches are relatively rare, especially those done from pragmatic perspective.

Based on the previous researches, the present study makes a tentative exploration into the underlying mechanisms of the verbal humor presented in Chinese and American sitcoms Home with Kids and Growing Pains, within the framework of two pragmatic theories, namely, Grice’s Cooperative Principle and Leech’s Politeness Principle. It is found, based on a qualitative analysis of a great sum of data, that a violation of CP and PP maxims can result in the generation of a lot of humor. Another important finding concerns the pragmatic strategies applied in Chinese and American verbal humors, which are discriminated along micro-macro dimension.

中南民族大学硕士学位论文

Micro-pragmatic strategies refer to those realized at the phonetic, lexical and rhetorical levels such as variation in pitch and stress patterns, the use of rhyme, homophones or homographs, coinage or nonce words, figures of speech, etc. Macro-pragmatic strategies refer to those oriented at establishing solidarity, aggression and self-defense. Solidarity-oriented strategies are presented as sharing experience, highlighting similarities and jesting while aggression-oriented strategies presented as conflict fostering, imposition and ridiculing. Defense-oriented strategies are concretely realized in forms of confessing, coping, self-denigrating and concealing.

The present thesis is concluded by pointing out the theoretical, communicative and pedagogical implications of the research. Theoretically, the present study of sitcom humor demonstrates a great potentiality of pragmatic theories in interpreting linguistic and literary phenomena and indicates a new direction for further literary pragmatic researches. Communicatively, the fact that the audience enjoys watching sitcoms implicates that humorous language and characters can facilitate the success of communication and make one more popular with others. Pedagogically, American sitcoms, which are loaded with humorous English language, cultural knowledge and social values, are the ideal material for both language and culture teaching to the EFL learners.

There is no doubt the present research has some limitations. For instance, only two pragmatic theories (CP and PP) have been applied in the interpretation of verbal humor occurring in the chosen sitcoms, leaving other equally or even more important theories (e.g. RT) untouched; this thesis is focused exclusively on the verbal humor in sitcoms, leaving humor in other forms unexplored, etc. These inadequacies should be taken as a reminder for the further studies of the same field.

Key words: verbal humor; situation comedies; pragmatic apparatuses; pragmatic strategies