On Humor In American Sitcom Friends From A Pramatics Perspective

Humor research has not usually been considered to be a discipline of great importance for a long time. Most people think that humorous utterance is just a pervasive occurrence. But in fact, it is the reverse side. In our lives humor plays an important role. It can make one laugh; make society more harmonious; reflect one's wisdom and attitude towards life; resolve conflicts between people and so forth. Although in ancient times the Western begins to study on humor, most theories concentrated on sociology, philosophy, anthropology, ect to find analysis on humor. In recent years, humor has been gradually concerned by linguistics. Because humor is mostly generated by humorous utterance, therefore, having the ability to respond to language is the essential factor to appreciate English humor. However, comparing to comprehend the plain English language, understanding humorous English language is certainly more difficult. And a lot of people can comprehend the words in sentence but cannot understand the meaning between the lines, because people must be not only well up in English, but must have superior understanding ability. Thus analyzing humor from the perspective of linguistics is a good solution to the problem. Therefore, this article attempts to adopt American sitcom Friends as the corpus, starting from the angle of pragmatics, to analyze the potential mechanism of humor under the theoretical framework of Cooperative Principle. The aim of the thesis is to improve the understanding ability of the English learners and to arouse their interest in humorous sentences in English, and then to enhance their ability of English application.Grice, a famous linguistic philosopher, puts forward Cooperative Principle which is one of the important principles in the modern pragmatics. And we can draw from this thesis that the important source of English humor production comes from violating the Cooperative Principle and its maxims. And the author analyzes several figures of speech in this thesis, and they violate the Cooperative Principle, which is the very important mechanism of humorous utterances production in American sitcom Friends.There are two points of the significance of the present study:on the one hand, analyzing the humor generation of American sitcom Friends under the theoretical framework of Grice's Cooperative Principle reveals that the humorous effect occurs when the speaker intentionally or unintentionally flouts one or more of Cooperative Principle maxims. This result can help the audiences to better interpretation of humor in Friends, as well as arouse the English learner's interest to study English. On the other hand, the research to humor can provide help with the people from different countries and cultures to make the effective communication, because humor can help people to avoid embarrassment, save one's face and eventually achieve harmonious interpersonal relationship.This thesis is established as a corpus, and then the author will select the data in this corpus to analyze humor production. And the research will adopt both descriptive and qualitative approaches to analyze the data.20 humorous utterances to be analyzed in this thesis were taken from American sitcom Friends. These 20 humorous utterances will be made a small corpus and the production of humorous utterances in Friends will be analyzed from the viewpoint of pragmatics of Cooperative Principle. Examples cited in the study were taken from the script of Friends, which was downloaded from the Internet through the address: http://www.sitcom.com. The writer also watched the related video tapes on the computer in order to insure the humorous effect of those examples and used the background laughter as the standard of humor to indicate below examples.The thesis consists of five chapters. Chapter one introduce the research significance and the overall structure of the thesis. Chapter two reviews literature, which includes some key words explanations, the brief introduction of Friends, and previous studies on humor abroad and at home. Chapter three is research methodology, including its general approach, data source and collection. Chapter four serves as the major focus of the study, which discusses Cooperative Principle and its maxims and analyzes humor production from the violation of Cooperative Principle and some figures of speech. The last chapter summarizes the major findings and limitations of the study with suggestions for further study in this area.Theoretically, this tentative study researches the humor production of American sitcom Friends by using Grice's Cooperative Principle, and it is an important source of humor production when the speaker intentionally or unintentionally flouts one or more of Cooperative Principle maxims. And the figure of speech applied in Friends is the important source of mechanism of humor production. Therefore, this study provides a new perspective for the pragmatic researchers, and brings fresh vigor to the pragmatic circle in China. And the present analysis of humor production of American sitcom Friends can be a complement to the previous studies.Practically, with the development of globalization, people from different countries are getting closer and closer, but some second language learners often find that it is difficult to conduct effective interpersonal communications. In that situation, humor plays an indispensable role. It can make our life colorful and more pleasant to live, help people to avoid embarrassment, and eventually achieve harmonious interpersonal relationship. Otherwise, the research on sitcom can help people better understand its humorous utterances, and arouse learners' interest in learning English.In short, adopting Cooperative Principle to analyze the humorous utterances in the sitcom is a very effective way for us. In this thesis, some important findings are founded, which can assist the English learner to understand and appreciate the humorous utterances in the sitcoms and also in our daily communication. Furthermore, studying humor is very important to train the ability of English learners and is also good for English teaching classroom to teach English better.