Humor And Gender: Humorous Speech Acts And Pragmatic Strategies

Verbal humor is a very common but special linguistic phenomenon. The use of humor is a complex and intriguing aspect of human behavior, which can help people to conduct all kinds of speech acts and influence communication. However, the study of gender and humor under the framework of pragmatics is a newcomer. The present research aims to explore gender similarities and differences in humorous speech acts and strategies with evidences from the most popular American situation comedy Friends.The thesis consists of six chapters including both theoretical discussion and a case study. Chapter One outlines the background of this study, its research methodology and the overall design of the thesis. Chapter Two is an overview of the general understanding and the theories of humor in the previous study.Chapter Three to Chapter Five is the focus of our study. Throughout the research, John Austin's Speech Act Theory, and Searfe's studies on the Theory of Speech Acts are adopted in order to explore humorous utterances. Hay's category of functions from social and psychological account of humor discourse is employed to examine the illocutionary and perlocutionary acts. The humorous utterances occurring in randomly selected episodes of Friends are first selected according to background audience laughter, and then classified and analyzed based on Searle's classification of speech acts. In addition, humor performers are divided into four groups: male-single group, female-single group, male-mixed group and female-mixed group. In these three chapters, the gender similarities and differences of humorous utterances in speech acts and pragmatic strategies are revealed in accordance with the frequency of distributions in statistical analysis.Chapter Three manages to discover gender features of humorous utterances in the illocutionary process. Males and females both favor representatives, and seldom use commissives. Compared with other subclasses of directives, questions are their favorite choice. In the single-sex group, the gender discrepancy of humor production is rather small. However, in the mixed-sex group, males produce larger amount of humor than females.Chapter Four concentrates on perlocutionary acts of male and female's humorous utterances. Statistics show that people in the single-sex group intend to attack others humorously, which happens oppositely to the mixed-sex group. This is due to the fact that men desire for solidarity with women who, on the contrary, focus on attacking or defending.Chapter Five discusses gender tendency in performing pragmatic strategies of humor. On the whole, males are very active in making fun in both single-sex and mixed-sex groups. To achieve solidarity, males prefer sharing and jesting in the single-sex group, and highlighting similarities in the mixed-sex group. They foster conflict to aggressive others and protect themselves by self-denigrating. However, females like highlighting similarities in the single-sex group, while adopt strategies of reinforcing boundaries and jesting to seek conformity when males are present. They highlight boundaries. Challenging existing boundaries is often applied to attack males.Chapter Six summarizes the present research, pointing out the original findings and its limitations and defects, and offering some suggestions for further study.