A Pragmatic Study Of Humor Effcct Of Rhetoric Devices In The Sitcom The Big Bang Theory

Humor is an essential element of human life. It plays a vital role in variouslanguages and cultures worldwide, which brings joy and reflects the wisdom and lifephilosophy of the speakers. For English language learners, it is important tocomprehend and appreciate the humor of English.Studies on humor have been paid lots of attention by scholars in many fields.Many linguists used to study humor from the perspectives of aesthetics, sociology,rhetoric, philosophy and discourse analysis, etc. From the1980s, more and morescholars started to study humor from a pragmatic perspective. Humor is an essentialelement in situation comedies, which provides many materials for pragmatic study ofhumor. The Big Bang Theory, one of the most popular US sitcom, is a good case forhumor research.This research intends to analyze the humor effects of rhetoric devices in The BigBang Theory by using two pragmatic theories: the Cooperative Principle and theRelevance Theory. The thesis has primarily explored how humor effects of rhetoricdevices generated, and interpreted the generation mechanisms of humor in sitcomsusing pragmatic theories. Furthermore, this thesis compares these two pragmatictheories on their different interpretations on humor effect of rhetorical devices. Basedon pragmatic theoretical framework, this thesis does the research mainly with the helpwith quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis as the major research methods inorder to achieve maximal reliability and minimize subjectivity of the author. Thelinguistic data are randomly chosen from60episodes of the sitcom The Big BangTheory.Research results show that humor can be generated in two ways. The first is toviolate the maxims of the Cooperative Principle while the second is to makediscrepancies between maximal relevance and optimal relevance of Relevance Theory,in which the former takes up63.3%in the production of humor created by rhetoricdevices while the latter occupies36.7%. Among all the cases of the flouting of themaxims of CP, the maxim of quality is the most frequently flouted, the others rankedby order of frequency is the maxim of quantity, the maxim of manner, and the maxim of relation. Among all the rhetorical devices, irony, hyperbole, and metaphor are mostcommon rhetoric devices which lead to humor effects and the rest are less frequent.Irony is the most frequently used, and the others ranked by order of frequency ishyperbole, metaphor, sarcasm, simile, pun, euphemism, pleonasm, and parallelism,and alliteration.After the analysis, the relevant theoretical hypothesis is further confirmed anddeveloped by applying the pragmatic approach to the explanation of the generationmechanisms of verbal humor including rhetoric devices in the sitcom The Big BangTheory. The findings of this thesis provide some useful suggestions for people tobetter understand and appreciate humor effect of rhetorical devices. The study ofhumor effects of rhetoric devices from the pragmatic level can help people becomebetter users of humorous language and rhetorical devices.