A Research On Cohesive And Coherent Mechanism Of Humor In Friends

Humor is an art which represents the wit and the interest of human beings. As a form of language, humor has attracted many linguists'attention. The present study perceives that humor is an important communication genre and form to represent thoughts. In communication, to realize the expected communicative purpose, a kind of euphemistic, periphrastic and relaxed atmosphere may be intentionally endowed in humor based on different contexts. Therefore, humor is a thought provoking discourse in a light atmosphere. Taking American sitcom Friends as the research material, the present study aims at probing into the working mechanism of cohesion and coherence in humor discourse from the perspective of Halliday's systemic functional grammar (SFG).The theory of discourse cohesion and coherence and its working mechanism are one of the important theories in SFG Recent study shows that the cohesion and coherence system not only can be activated by overt lexico-grammatical devices in discourse, but can be enhanced by the covert factors. The cohesion and coherence for cultural connotation and interpersonal meaning rely mainly on these factors. Therefore, the deep research on these factors can reveal discourse semantic structure in a more detailed way. Among traditional studies of humor, few scholars process and perceive humor from the perspective of discourse functions and the working mechanism of cohesion and coherence. Based on the philosophy of viewing language as social semiotic system in SFQ with an analysis of some situational dialogues in Friends, the present study probes into the working mechanism of cohesion and coherence in humor discourse and the findings are as follows:First, the realization of cohesion and coherence in humor discourse not simply relies on overt cohesive devices, such as reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction and lexical cohesion. More importantly, it relies on covert cohesion and coherence factors formed by register features and metaphorical thinking mechanism.Second, the variation of situational context influences the genre of discourse. The production and interpretation of humor cannot be realized without situational context. Metaphor is an essential thinking mechanism to form humor discourse. With overt cohesive devices, the discourse gradually sets up a kind of coherent thinking and expectation in audience's mind. However, metaphor, especially grammatical metaphor, always breaks down the regular expectation and employs a transferred expression on the lexico-grammatical level to construe the same experience and thus creates a light atmosphere. As a result, the humorous effect is realized. Humor performs the three meta-functions of language in communication. The present study perceives that in humor discourse ideational cohesion and coherence realizes the experience and logic; textual cohesion and coherence realizes the relationship of its information; interpersonal cohesion and coherence realizes the communicators' tenor. Humor is a form realizing interpersonal metaphor. It extends the polarity of interpersonal meaning, which weakens the differences and helps achieve the communication in a humorous atmosphere. Therefore, through the functional analysis of humor discourse from the perspective of cohesion and coherence, we find that this framework can better reveal the ideational, textual and interpersonal functions of humor.The creative point of the present study is that it probes into the working mechanism of cohesion and coherence in humor discourse from the perspective of register and metaphor in SFG. This broadens the perspectives of humor study and has certain instructive significance for cross-culture communication and English teaching and learning.