| As an extended form of drama, situation comedy has always been the favor of common people, but definitely not of scholars, since there are still not many researches on this type of TV drama, especially within the framework of drama stylistics. Previous studies on situation comedy are either concerned with its humorous mechanism or are carried out from the perspective of traditional stylistics to analyze its characteristics at the phonological, syntactic and textual level. Situation comedy's distinguishing features - humorous dialogues and individualistic characters are largely left untouched.This thesis selects American situation comedy Friends'polished dramatic dialogues as study object, with an attempt to exploit the theories and methodologies of pragmatics and discourse analysis to explore the characterization of situation comedy and further, to research on the relationship between pragmatic principles and individualistic personalities. All in all, turn-taking analyses are rewarding in that they convincingly reveal the power relationship among a group of people and also their behaviors as social members, while speech act theory, cooperative principle and politeness principle are more suitable for being employed to analyze individualistic personalities which scriptwriters have delicately designed through dialogues.Studies have demonstrated that pragmatic principles are closely related to personality, in that people vary in their choices of linguistic features as well as pragmatic maxims, deliberately or unwittingly. We have seen that some representative personality is systematically exposed in the analyses of different theories and methodologies. That is to say, theoretical principles, despite their different assumptions or perspectives, have all succeeded in revealing some truth in human interaction. Therefore, a convincing theoretical framework of drama stylistics is to incorporate all these presuppositions of oral interactions so as to fully appreciate characterization in drama.
|
PDF Full Text Request