A Contrastive Pragmatic Study On Humorous Communication Between Friends & Its Chinese Version

Humorous language, as the main form to express humor, is popular in our daily life. It comes from our daily life while to some degree it goes beyond life reality. Humor is such a pervasive human phenomenon, observable in many aspects of life that it has been studied from a multi-disciplinary viewpoint, including fields like linguistics, rhetoric, aesthetics, philosophy, sociology, and etc. In fact, the study of humor can be traced back to the time of Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) and Freud (1856-1939).Since humorous language is often expressed in the form of conversations in everyday life, it has distinctive pragmatic characteristics. In various books and articles on pragmatics, humorous conversations are frequently taken as examples for pragmatic analysis and studies. Thus the close relationship between humor and pragmatics seems evident. Effective humorous language often reflects one or several pragmatic features.Situation comedy or"sitcom"is a genre of comedy performance. The humor in sitcom has its own characteristics. Although humor has received enough attention, the contrastive study on humor in situation comedy between its English version and Chinese version is still a new topic in the research field and the linguistic studies on humor in sitcom are still somewhat limited within the field of discourse analysis, foreign language teaching, and cross-cultural study, etc.The present thesis offers a new perspective—Contrastive Analysis—to the study of humor in situation comedy"Friends"and its Chinese version from the perspective of pragmatics, with the hope of finding the similarities and diversities in the humor production and comprehension between the two versions. The author intends to apply some of the major theories, namely, Cooperative Principle, Politeness Principle and Context theory to the analysis of the production and appreciation of verbal humor. The author takes both the transcript version and the video version of the American sitcom Friends as the data sources, and collects 153 and 131 humorous communications respectively from two episodes of each season ( at random) of Friends and its Chinese version for the contrastive analysis. The main aim is to address the following research questions. Firstly, how can we explain the creation of humor in the specific context—situation comedy within the framework of pragmatics, especially to find what similarities and diversities are in the humor production and comprehension between Friends and its Chinese version? To address this question, a contrastive pragmatic analysis of the come-about of humorous effect in the humor samples taken from sitcom Friends is presented. Secondly, how can we account for humor appreciation failures of the English version? To address this question, a large number of examples concerning the humor appreciation failures for the Chinese audience are illustrated in detail. Meanwhile, through the contrastive analysis, some contextual factors especially the cultural context factors are revealed which have great impact on the appreciation of humor. People coming from different cultures usually possess different living patterns, customs, habits, rites and rituals, languages, worldview, value, belief, patterns of thinking, so on and so forth. Thus, because of the inaccessibility of certain culture-specific contextual assumptions due to the great differences between Chinese culture and American culture, Chinese audience sometimes cannot catch the right interpretation intended by the American humorist so that we cannot get the pleasant surprise and consequently, fail to appreciate the humor the humorist intends to convey.This study on humor in sitcom Friends has both theoretical and practical significance. Theoretically, although the pragmatic approach to the explanation of the mechanism of humor production and appreciation has been proposed for a few years, this generalized theoretical explanation of the mechanism of humor is seldom utilized in the analysis of a specific humor context and has seldom been testified. So by applying the pragmatic approach to the explanation of the mechanism of humor to the specific context—situation comedy, the corresponding theoretical hypothesis is further verified and developed. The second theoretical significance is that this contrastive analysis of humor can to some extent make certain complementation to the researches on contrastive analysis and humor. And the third theoretical significance is that the thesis provides the analysis with the explanation of humor appreciation failures in a cross-cultural context so that it will further extend the boundary of applicability of pragmatic theories to the area of cross-cultural communication. Practically, the present study is believed to be able to shed light on the translation of humor and subtitling.