On Linguistic Features Of Humor In The Modern American Sitcom Friends From Hallidayan System-functional Approach

The thesis is a tentative endeavor to investigate the linguistic features from the aspect of the functional structure and components in the humorous language in the situational comedy. Based on the cognitive theories about the mechanism of humor, the author applies the Hallidayan system-functional approach and takes samples from the modern American situational comedy Friends.The author makes a general review about the cognitive theories and proposes the idea of "incongruity" which explains the cognitive mechanism of humor. Upon the retrospect of current pragmatic studies of humor, the author discovers the research vacancy in study of process from the functional structure and components to the realization of humorous effect, and makes a tentative attempt to apply Hallidayan's system-functional approach to make it up.Halliday defines three metafunctions of the language including the ideational funciont, interpersonal function and textual function which are realized through lexicogrammar systems of transitivity, mood and modality and cohesive ties respectively. Transitivity are processes of material, relation and mental that represent the logic and experiential meanings in the language; mood and modality are the roles , attitude and judgment of the speakers as language is a process of interaction; the cohesive ties are means of relating text within the textual context or cultural context that makes the meanings cohesive and comprehensible. Following the systematic functional approach, the author both quantitatively and qualitatively analyzes and concludes a series of linguistic strategies that bring about the effect of humor in the language following the systematic functional approach.The research is oriented towards the methodology not the result. Therefore, the biggest contribution is the enlightenment of the new approach and angel in studying humor and language in a comedian play. It is a tentative attempt to apply the Halliday's system-functional grammar to study the linguistic features of humor in the situational comedy to make up vacancy in the study of humor and language from the aspect of language structure and components in a humorous play. The results contribute to the linguistic strategies for creating humor in the language. Admittedly, humor is a quite complicated issue. The...