A Transitivity Analysis Of Verbal Humor In Young Sheldon

The study mainly employs Halliday’s transitivity system to discuss the humorous dialogues in Young Sheldon so as to explain the formation mechanism of humor at the lexico-grammatical level.Besides,the study adopts Halliday’s register theory to reveal how situational factors restrict the transitivity choice leading to verbal humor in Young Sheldon,thus the impact of situational factors on the realization form of lexical grammar is clear.With the first three seasons of Young Sheldon as the corpus,this thesis randomly selected 160 dialogues for humor analysis,aiming to answer the following three questions:(1)What’s the distribution of the three components of transitivity system in the verbal humor of Young Sheldon?(2)How do the six transitivity processes realize verbal humor in Young Sheldon?(3)How do the three situational factors,namely field,tenor and mode,restrict the transitivity choice leading to verbal humor in Young Sheldon?The research findings are as follows:(1)In terms of transitivity processes,material,relational and mental processes are the three major processes in the humorous dialogues of Young Sheldon,among which material processes play a dominant role;in terms of participants,actors and goals involved in the material processes are the most common;in terms of circumstance,time,place,and manner appear most frequently.(2)According to the transitivity system,the verbal humor in Young Sheldon arises from the incongruity between different components within each transitivity process,that is,the incongruity between participants,process verbs and circumstantial elements.In the material process,verbal humor is mainly produced by the incongruity between actor,process and goal.In the mental process,verbal humor is mainly caused by the incongruity between senser,process and phenomenon.In the relational process,verbal humor is primarily achieved by the incongruity between carrier and attribute.In the behavioral process,verbal humor is mainly produced by the incongruity between behaver,process and circumstance.In the verbal process,verbal humor is largely generated by the incongruity between sayer,process and verbiage.In the existential process,verbal humor is primarily caused by the incongruity between the existent and the audience’s expectation.(3)Situational factors place a restriction on the transitivity choice leading to verbal humor in Young Sheldon:the field restricts the transitivity choice through topic,activity and setting;the tenor plays a restrictive role through personal tenor and functional tenor;the mode influences the generation of humor through repetition and interruption.Among the three situational factors,the field is the most influential factor.The study is practically significant.Through the transitivity analysis of verbal humor in Young Sheldon,this study explains the realization processes of humor,which could enrich humor studies from the perspective of Systemic-functional Grammar and deepen people’s understanding of humorous discourses.