A Study Of The Verbal Humor In Modern Family Based On The Adaptation-Relevance Model

Verbal humor,as one of the significant strategies of verbal communication,has strong adaptation and relevance to the context,showing great influence on the process of communication.Meanwhile,it is effective in adjusting serious atmosphere,avoiding embarrassment,or conveying insinuation,etc.Verbal humor has gained much attention from many scholars at home and abroad and the research results are abundant.According to the collected materials,the previous studies on verbal humor are carried out from sorts of perspectives,mainly including cognitive research,semantics,discourse analysis,translation,pragmatics,etc.Scholars at home and abroad prefer to study verbal humor from the perspectives of Cooperative Principle,Politeness Principle,memetics,relevance theory,and adaptation theory in pragmatics.However,there are relatively less studies of verbal humor based on the adaptation-relevance model.As a synthetic model compounded by relevance theory and adaptation theory,adaptation-relevance model is proposed by Ran Yongping,a scholar at home,in 2004,which can explain linguistic phenomena in communication well.Besides,the contextual communication in the situation comedy(abbreviated as sitcom),as one of the forms of TV series presentation,is receiving more attention.Taking all the above into account,this thesis attempts to study the verbal humor in American sitcom Modern Family based on the adaptation-relevance model,accurately from the perspectives of contextual assumption,dynamic process of adaptation-relevance,and relevance orientation,aiming to study the production and interpretation of verbal humor so that people can have a better knowledge of utilizing verbal humor and fulfilling their communicative intention.This thesis chooses Modern Family(English version)filmed by American 20 th Century Fox Film Corporation as research data,which is extremely popular among people since the first season was released in 2009.This sitcom has won the Outstanding Comedy Series of Emmy Award—the highest award in the field of TV series—5 times.Since the 10 th season is on and will end in June,2019,it is improper to take the 10 th season as research data.Thus,this thesis takes some typical conversations as research data in the 1st and the 9th seasons,for the former season is a significant beginning of this classic sitcom,and the latter season is the latest complete season.Besides,there are more humorous conversations in the two seasons.In order to fulfill the aim of this thesis,the conversations in this sitcom are divided into different types in accordance with language representations,strategy-choosing and frequency,through which people can understand the utilization and presentation of the verbal humor in Modern Family.Then detailed analyses are made of the production and interpretation of three typical types of the verbal humor with high frequency in this sitcom by employing adaptationrelevance model.This study discovers that there are mainly three typical types of verbal humor with high frequency in Modern Family,which are selected out to be analyzed in detail: verbal humor with irony,verbal humor with comparison,verbal humor with face-threatening/saving behavior.In addition,the production of the verbal humor in Modern Family depends on whether the communicators have certain shared knowledge of the communicative contents.To put it precisely,if the hearer has limited cognition and less shared knowledge,it is difficult for him to adapt to the speaker's contextual assumption or three worlds,not to mention helping the speaker achieve his communicative purpose by seeking the optimal relevance,and then verbal humor is generated because of the hearer's limited cognitive ability and less shared knowledge.If the hearer and the speaker have certain shared knowledge,whether their communicative purposes are same has an impact on the next study.After understanding and inferring the optimal relevance in the speaker's utterance: if the hearer has the same communicative purpose as the speaker's,he will adapt to the speaker's contextual assumption.In such a situation,the generation of verbal humor depends on whether their communicative purposes or language use is humorous.If the speaker and the hearer have different communicative purposes that can be achieved by inter-adapting to each other's contextual assumption,they will help each other to fulfill the communication.Under this condition,verbal humor is generated for different purposes behind the semblance of accord.If the hearer's communicative purpose cannot be fulfilled by adapting to the speaker's contextual assumption,the hearer will not assist the speaker to achieve his communicative purpose.Hence,verbal humor is generated through the language use the hearer chooses to respond to the speaker and the differences between the optimal relevance both communicators express in utterances.Besides,the communicators need to choose different strategies to help themselves achieve their communicative intentions,including linguistic strategies and pragmatic strategies,which,to some extent,are of great help to generate verbal humor.This thesis,to a certain degree,is helpful and valuable to render people have a better understanding of the production and interpretation of the verbal humor in Modern Family,and have an increasing awareness of utilizing verbal humor as a communicative strategy to fulfill communicative purposes.Then,this thesis assists Chinese learners to have a better knowledge of American verbal humor and American culture,which helps Chinese learners study English in an interesting way and promotes cultural understanding and exchange between countries.