Humor In Friends In Light Of Adaptation Theory

Humor is ubiquitous as a language phenomenon, which plays an essential role in our daily lives. As a tool of entertainment, it can erase unhappiness, release tensions or psychic pressures make people laugh and harmonize personal relationships. It has a very ancient tradition of studies and interpretations. Studies on humor have been researched by Plato and Aristotle through the perspective of philosophy since 400 B.C. Nowadays it has become one of the hottest issues under discussion as an interdisciplinary object of research. It has been studied in many disciplines and from many perspectives. The research ranges from traditional fields such as psychology, physiology and philosophy to anthropology, sociology, and many other fields. Humor has especially been conducted from pragmatic perspective by many researchers. In spite of these contributions, there still lacks a comprehensive study on humor, since the use of humor is closely related to social, cultural and cognitive factors. Therefore, it is still necessary to have a further study of humor.According to Verschueren pragmatics is a general cognitive, social and cultural perspective on linguistic phenomena in relation to their usage in forms of behavior. On this basis he proposes Adaptation Theory, which claims that language use is the process of making choice by adapting to context and linguistic structure in a dynamic way at various levels of salience. The reason why human beings can make continuous choices in language use lies in the three properties of language: variability, negotiability, and adaptability. And linguistic adaptation could be examined from four angels: contextual correlates of adaptability, structural objects of adaptability, dynamics of adaptability, and the salience of the adaptation process.4.4 Under the framework of Adaptation Theory this thesis aims to answer the following questions. What are the linguistic choices that the communicators use to produce humorous utterances? What strategies do the speakers choose to produce humorous utterances? When making choices, what do language users try to adapt to? And The degrees of consciousness in humorous utterances during the adaptation process. After analysis and investigation, it has been found out when communicators choose humor as a communicative strategy to realize their communicative goals, they adapt to the following levels with regard to linguistic context and language structure: the lexical level, the syntactic level, the stylistic level and the prosodic level. On communicative context, they adapt to the psychological intentions, social and cultural conventions. And the adaptation is always dynamic. This thesis will focus on communicative context.