Analysis Of Humor In Modern American Situation Comedies From The Perspectives Of Flouting The Cooperative Principle And The Politeness Principle

As a very popular type of TV program, situation comedy (abbreviated as sitcom hereafter) has won enormous popularity among Chinese audience. Many researches have been conducted to analyze modern American sitcoms. However, as the existing literature shows, in the West, the study of the sitcom mainly focuses on treating the sitcom as a television program proper from the socio-cultural perspective and few researches have been conducted on the humorous language in American sitcoms. Some scholars in China are also doing research on American sitcoms. As far as the material collected by the author is concerned, until recently, these scholars treat the American sitcom as a new artistic style and most of their researches focus on the features of its own text, script writing and artistic style of American sitcoms. Moreover, the humorous language in American sitcoms has aroused the interests of people who are engaged in linguistic studies. Specially, some post-graduates majoring in linguistics begin to analyze the humorous language in American sitcoms in their theses by employing the stylistics, relevance theory, Hallidayan system-functional grammar and discourse analysis. At the same time, in recent years, some researchers use the Cooperative Principle and the Politeness Principle to study the humor in some materials, such as literature works, jokes, movies, comic dialogues and comic skits. Few tentative studies have been made of the humor in modern American sitcoms from the perspectives of the CP and the PP.Therefore, this thesis attempts to explore the humor in modern American sitcoms from the perspectives of flouting the Cooperative Principle (CP) and the Politeness Principle (PP), and then reveal the common mechanism of generation of the humor in modern American sitcoms, which may help the Chinese audience to understand and appreciate the humor in modern American sitcoms better.This thesis adopts both quantitative approach and qualitative approach to examine how humor is represented in modern American sitcoms by flouting the CP and the PP. The quantitative research is employed to count the exact numbers, and frequency of the humorous utterances by flouting of the CP and the PP and summarize the common characteristics of the humorous language in modern American sitcoms; the qualitative research is undertaken to analyze how humor in modern American sitcoms is generated by violating the maxims of the CP and the PP.The present study leads to four findings. Firstly, the majority of the humors in modern American sitcoms are realized by flouting some conversational principles, such as the CP and the PP. Secondly, most of the humorous effects in modern American sitcoms are achieved by more extensively flouting the maxims of the CP compared with the PP. Thirdly, in terms of flouting the maxims of the CP, namely, the Maxim of Quantity, the Maxim of Quality, the Maxim of Relation and the Maxim of Manner, the Maxim of Quality is the most frequently flouted one, and then comes the Maxim of Manner and the Maxim of Quantity. The Maxim of Relation is the least frequently flouted. While in terms of flouting the maxims of the PP, namely, the Tact Maxim, the Generosity Maxim, the Approbation Maxim, the Modesty maxim, the Agreement Maxim and the Sympathy Maxim, the Modesty maxim is the most frequently flouted one, and then comes the Approbation Maxim, the Agreement Maxim, the Sympathy Maxim and the Tact maxim. The Generosity Maxim is the least frequently flouted. Fourthly, generally, the language in modern American sitcoms has two features. On the one hand, as far as the flouting of the Maxim of Quality of the CP is concerned, the humorous language in modern American sitcoms is achieved by applying many rhetorical devices, like metaphor, irony, hyperbole and meiosis. Furthermore, when it comes to the flouting of the Maxim of Manner, many rhetorical devices, namely, euphemism, paradox and pun are also employed. On the other hand, as for the flouting of the CP and the PP, many humorous languages are realized by relating to the most forbidden topics, such as sex and homosexuality.To sum up, this study may be of great theoretical and practical significance due to its exploratory and primary research in this field. On the one hand, this study is expected to set light on the further investigations on other linguistic phenomena from the perspectives of the CP and the PP and simultaneously enrich the theories of sitcoms. On the other hand, the findings, to some extent, make some contributions to the production and perception of humor in modern American sitcoms and therefore may help the Chinese audience better enjoy and understand American sitcoms.