A Study Of English Humor In American Situation Comedy Friends From A Pragmatic Perspective

Humor study has not commonly been regarded as a subject of great importance for a long time. Humorous utterance, in most people's opinion, is just a common occurrence. As a matter of fact, it is the other way round. Humor plays a very important role in practice. It can adjust social relationship; amuse one's mood; enrich one's life; exhibit one's wisdom and so on. Although the Western research on humor goes back to ancient times, most of the theories focus on sociology, psychology and cognitive psychology to find analysis on humor, which gives birth to the three primary and traditional branches of humor theories including the superiority/ disparagement theory from the perspective of sociology, relief theory from the perspective of psychoanalysis and the incongruity theory from the perspective of cognitive psychology.However, one aspect of humor has been neglected for long. It is that humor is generated mostly by humorous utterance. That is to say, humor is a special kind of linguistic form. Therefore, appreciation of humor, especially English humor, depends upon the ability to respond to language. This is perhaps why humorous utterance has been regarded as the most difficult to understand of all utterances. Certainly it is more difficult to understand humorous English language than to comprehend plain English language. Many people can understand the sentence in words but cannot apprehend the meaning between the lines. A good solution to the problem is to analyze humor from the angle of linguistics, especially pragmatics in respect that it is the most commonly used theory to study humor by experts and scholars. Accordingly, the author of this thesis intends to make a survey of English humor from the pragmatic perspective. And the author tries to make the analysis on the generation and appreciation of English humor penetrating and incisive by application of the humorous utterance examples in the American sitcom Friends.To some extent, the humorous utterances in Friends set up lots of obstacles before the English learners and make them hang back in fear to the apprehension and appreciation of the English humor. The author of this thesis wants to make a breakthrough in the analysis of the humorous utterances in Friends with the help of pragmatic theories involving Cooperative Principle (CP) and its conversational maxims, Politeness Principle (PP), and Speech Acts Theory. The aim of the thesis is the amelioration of the English learners'comprehension and interest in English humor and the improvement of their English application competence.Grice's Cooperative Principle is one of the substantial elements of the modern pragmatics. This thesis analyzes that the conversational implicature caused by violating the Cooperative Principle and its maxims (maxim of quantity, maxim of quality, maxim of relevance and maxim of manner) is the important source of English humor. And the rhetoric applied to flout the Cooperative Principle is the crucial mechanism of the production of humorous utterances in Friends.Nevertheless, the Cooperative Principle usually gives place to Politeness Principle. The Politeness Principle put forward by Leech is the effectual complementarity for the Cooperative Principle. Sometimes the speaker seems excessive courtesy through observing the Politeness Principle and sometimes the hearer seems humble and ridiculous by the speaker's violating the Politeness Principle. In Friends the humor caused by observing or violating the Politeness Principle can be found everywhere.Besides, this thesis also discusses the humorous utterances depending on the Speech Acts Theory. Austin classifies it into three categories: Locutioanry act, Illocutionary act, and Perlocutionary act. Afterwards, Searle subdivides the illocutionary act into five categories: representatives, directives, commissives, expressives, and declarations. According to Searle's subdivision the author of this thesis analyzes the humor caused by the Speech Act Theory in Friends. What is discovered is that we can not only do things with words but also make fun with words.To sum up, it is an effective way to make humorous utterances analysis by means of relevant pragmatic theories. The findings of this thesis can help the English learners to comprehend and appreciate the humorous utterances in English sitcoms as well as in daily communication. Furthermore, the author proceeds to explain the importance to cultivate the English learners'pragmatic competence and highlight the good effect through applying humor to English teaching classroom.