A Contrastive Study On Humorous Communication Between English And Chinese Sitcoms-from Pragmatic Perspective

Verbal humor, as an artful way of communication, exists in people's daily conversation now and then. In the early 20th century, Chinese professor Lin Yutang first brought the word"you mo"(humor) into China and defined it as"Humor is a popular art form to express one's viewpoint and even perception of the real world."(quoted in胡范铸,1987: 7-8). In another word, humor should not only be a device to make people laugh or relax, it should be something that can provoke people's deeper thought. By this token, the close relationship between humor and pragmatics seems evident.From ancient Greek philosophers to modern linguists and psychologists, many have studied humor in various aspects: philosophy, esthetics, psychology, physiology, sociology and linguistics. Comparatively speaking, study of humor in linguistic study, especially the pragmatic study of language is rather a new perspective. Ever since the existence of pragmatics, especially due to the establishment of some pragmatic theories, namely, the Cooperative Principle (CP), the Politeness Principle (PP) and the Speech Act Theory (SAT), language experts have been focusing about the production of verbal humor, believing that humor could be generated by violating the maxims of Cooperative Principle (CP), by violating or abiding by the Politeness Principle (PP), by misinterpreting the speaker's Speech Act or the inappropriate conditions of certain speech acts, etc.Situation comedy (referred as sitcom hereafter), as a genre of comedy performance, which has assembled so many humors to attract the audience and to achieve the comic effect,now has been very well received. Sitcom, now has been established as part of the staple diet of mainstream television entertainment throughout the world. The language in the sitcom is up-to-date and closely connected with native speakers'daily life that reflects the native speakers'production of language. Nowadays, sitcoms are popular both in China and America. However, Chinese sitcoms and American sitcoms have different development paths and different features on creating humor. This is why sitcom is taken as the object of the study here and the dialogues in it are analyzed by applying some approaches to pragmatics. In this thesis, the author chooses Chinese sitcom Home with Kids and American sitcom Growing Pains as the research targets and focuses on these three techniques to conduct a contrastive study: the violations of Cooperative Principle, the observing of Politeness Principle and the using of hedges. About ten episodes in both English and Chinese sitcoms are chosen as research samples. The episodes are chosen mainly depending on the same theme which occurs both in Growing Pains and Home with Kids. On the basis of theoretical research, qualitative as well as quantitative analysis are conducted so as to examine how the Chinese and English humors are represented from the perspective of pragmatics.Through a contrastive study on pragmatic characteristics of the humorous language in Chinese sitcom Home with Kids and American sitcom Growing Pains, the author attempts to achieve the following: (1) sum up the similar pragmatic features in both Chinese and American sitcoms. Based on these features, the author tries to help language learners comprehend the humors much better; (2) find out the differences in adopting the pragmatic theories, and then move forward to discover the root causes—diverse cultural backgrounds.