A Pragmatic Approach To Humorous Utterances: Humorous Speech Acts And Strategies Realized In American Sitcom Friends

The use of humor is a complex and intriguing aspect of human behaviour, which can help people to conduct all kinds of speech acts and influence communication. The main foundation of this approach is the hypothesis that other than producing amusement, people use humor to do all kinds of speech activities and realize special communicative goals. The present research attempts to explore the dynamic interaction between illocutionary acts and perlocutionary acts in which humor is involved in, aiming at the improvement of the perception of humorous utterances in American Sitcom and extending the approaches to the analysis of humorous utterances (HU) in sitcom and conversational texts. Through a case study of American television sitcom Friends, regularities from the data shows tendency of strategic use of humor in all kinds of speech acts.Throughout this research, John Austin's Speech Acts Theory, and Searle's Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts shall be adopted in order to classify humorous utterances. Hay's category of functions from social and psychological account of humor discourse will be adopted to explore the perlocutionary acts. Hay, Yus, together with other researchers' preliminary findings in humor strategies will be applied to study the strategic use of verbal humor in communication, and strategies for sitcom humor interpretation, from which tentative conclusions about the pragmatic mechanism may be drawn.The thesis consists of six chapters including both theoretical discussion and a case study. Chapter One outlines the rationale, objectives, research methodology and the overall design of the thesis. Chapter Two offers an overview of humor, its definition, genres, main...