An Analysis Of Interpersonal Meaning In Discourses Of Situation Comedy

To study a situation comedy, it is necessary to take comic effect or humor into consideration because the main task or the soul of a situation comedy is to make the audience laugh. Aside from the visual effect that can explicitly bring about comic effect, humor in situation comedies can also be realized by the special language style—humorous conversations. In recent years, many linguistic scholars have paid much attention to the humorous conversations in situation comedy from various perspectives. Previous studies mainly start from the perspective of pragmatics, stylistics or cultural aspects, and the present research attempts to study the interpersonal meaning in situation comedy, with the aim to discuss its language mechanism and characteristics. Based on Thompson's interpersonal modal and other linguists'contribution to interpersonal meaning, the thesis carries out the analysis of interpersonal meaning in situation comedy mainly from the following five aspects: mood, modality, evaluation, person system and tenor. A qualitative method is adopted when samples are analyzed which are selected from the humorous discourses in Friends—an American situation comedy which is most popular for almost ten years in the world.Through the analysis, it is found that interpersonal meaning in situation comedy has its own mechanism and characteristics when used to realize comic effect. With mood structures purposely used, normal speech roles, topic dominance and metaphorical meaning of mood are broken. Different tones are also deliberately controlled in the same mood structures to create comic effect. By marked use of linguistic devices of modality, such as adjectives and adverbs, the normal meaning conveyed by the speaker is twisted and incongruity is created. In situation comedy, evaluation is mainly realized by evaluative adjectives and adverbs which are usually inappropriately used in the situation conversations to fulfill the specific purpose or selected as polite strategies to express congruous meaning with the context. Also, in situation comedy, evaluation system is intentionally employed to violate politeness principle in order to create humor. As for person system in situation comedy, its special function is mainly realized by personal pronouns, person referential switch and vocatives which are used in abnormal way. In situation comedy, the mismatched tenor elements, such as abnormal use of mood structure and person system, could change the normal role relationship between participants. In doing so, the normal way of interpersonal meaning is broken and unexpectedness is created, thus humor comes out.The analysis of interpersonal meaning in situation comedy will be a helpful supplement to the studies of situation comedy. Meanwhile, it will widen the audience's interpretation of humor in situation comedy and enable the playwrights to pay more attention to lexica-grammatical resources of interpersonal meaning that can be used to realize comic effect in situation comedy. Also, the findings will be helpful for the application of interpersonal meaning into humor in daily communication and make interaction more comfortable.