A Study Of Humorous Speech Acts In Friends

Humor, as a linguistic phenomenon, exists everywhere in people's daily life. Different people have different ways for the research of humor. From the perspective of speech act, with the collection and statistics of all verbal humor in the most popular American sitcom Friends, the thesis aims to explore the main means adopted by this comedy to perform its humorous speech acts as well as the deep-rooted reasons accounting for these means so as to appreciate the typical American humor from a new angle.After discussing the contributions and limitations of J. Austin's Speech Act Theory and J.K. Searle's classifications of illocutionary acts, the thesis regards humor as an eliciting-laughter speech act and tries to discuss humor in the respect of pragmatic act which is proposed by Mey (2003) to take interactants, context and other factors into consideration. Based on the collection and classification of the corpus, the study on the performative means and the main reasons of English humorous speech acts is from a more macroscopic angle, rather than categorizing these humorous speech acts according to their speech act verbs, because some researches have demonstrated that some speech acts can also perform their corresponding illocutionary force without the help of speech act verbs. Hence, the present study focuses on how humorous speech acts perform their illocutionary force of eliciting laughter.According to the background audience's laughter recorded in soundtrack in the videodisks, the present author picks out all verbal humor from 234 episodes of this comedy, amounting to 2980 conversational turns with total 4541 items of humorous utterances. Tan Daren (1997) states that human speech acts activities are mainly restricted by four rules: linguistic rules, rhetoric rules, logical rules and communicative rules, so are humorous speech acts. Rhetoric can be treated as a linguistic means which serves the vivid and interesting expressions by making use of linguistic elements. Based on Tan Daren's framework, the author classified the 4541 humorous utterances. In order to avoid repeating counting and highlight the focus of the study, the present author gives the first priority to analyze linguistic means adopted mainly including the English phonological, lexical, semantic and rhetorical means, and then makes a further study on the main characteristics under every means. Those humorous utterances without evident employment of linguistic means are processed in the respect of logical rules or communicative rules. Therefore, the results can be generated to show how humorous speech acts in Friends perform the illocutionary force of eliciting laughter, which paves the way for discussing the deep reasons.The results of the study show that the successful performance of humorous speech acts in Friends rests a lot with the co-effects of the humorist (humor producer) who intentionally uses certain linguistic means or violates some logical or communicative rules in the process of communication, and the interpreter (audience) who should be equipped with relevant cultural background knowledge. It is worth pointing out that the quantities of linguistic means adopted account for 82.4% characterized by phonological means including intonation, tone, phonological mocking and phonological ambiguity, lexical means including neologism and lexical ambiguity, semantic means including semantic ambiguity and semantic turn, 28 rhetorical devices including irony, euphemism, metaphor, hyperbole, transferred wording and so forth. The employment of logical rules and communicative rules account for 9.1% and 8.5% respectively characterized by sophistry and violence of the relevance rule respectively. In addition, it is found that apart from the knowledge about background plots of this comedy, there are 168 items of humorous speech acts accounting for about 4% calling for audience's relevant cultural knowledge including history, geography, religion, social customs and so forth so as to interpret humorous effects successfully. A lot of examples in Friends are cited by the present author to illustrate the results. In Chapter 5, the main reasons for the above-mentioned performative means are discussed, including the linguistic features of English as well as their influences on American way of thinking, western values rooted in English humor and their effects on the employment of rhetorical means, the playwriting of the sitcom, etc. The discussion of reasons has an explanatory force for the performative means of humorous speech acts.Although the research result is just limited to the case of Friends, from which we can appreciate the characteristics of English humorous speech acts. The research may provide implications to English teaching and learning as well as cross-cultural communication.