An Analysis Of The Verbal Humor In American Sitcom Growing Pains From The Perspective Of Pragmatics

As an effective way of interpersonal communication, humor is an important section of all languages and cultures. Nash (1981:1) once mentioned: "Humor is the distinctive features of human beings" (quoted in刘承宇, 2006: 278). Humor is a multi-discipline research topic, which draws the attention from philosophy, psychology, literature, sociology, linguistics, medical field and anthropology. However, the study of humor has been always considered as a margin field since long time ago. Since the 70s and 80s last century, with the development of semantics and pragmatics, many linguists have made great contribution in the field of humor research, bringing it into a new era. The comprehension of humor firstly depends on the decoding of the literal meaning of utterances or letters, and then on the comprehension of context, and lastly on the inference of every implication in the specific context with the help of abstract thinking. From the perspective of pragmatics, the comprehension of humor is a process of pragmatic inference, which is involved with conversational implication.Based on the traditional theories on humor study, this thesis intends to employ some pragmatic theories, including Cooperative Principle, Politeness Principle, Speech Act Theory and Relevance Theory, to analyze the considerable examples of verbal humor in the famous American sitcom Growing Pains, through which the author has made a tentative exploration for the deeper structure of English verbal humor, namely the inner production mechanism of it. The finding of this study has provided some effective suggestions for people to comprehend and appreciate English verbal humor.Among the recent study of verbal humor, most scholars have focused on the theoretical study of this field, paying little attention to the application of humor in practical communication. Through the detailed analysis of concrete examples, the author has concluded the possible reasons why the non-natives can't comprehend the humor in Growing Pains, which includes: the unfamiliarity with knowledge of idioms, slang and English rhetorical devices in the language level; the weak pragmatic inference competence; and the unfamiliarity with social background, customs and habits of English societies. To transcend these obstacles, the author holds the view that in the process of Second Language Acquisition the teachers should not only cultivate the learners' language competence but also their pragmatic awareness and competence. Through the pragmatic study of verbal humor in this sitcom, the author draws a tentative conclusion that to comprehend and appreciate the verbal humor in English sitcoms is helpful to cultivate and improve the learners' pragmatic competence.