An Analysis On Vagueness Of Humor In Friends

Humor, as a special language art, penetrates every part of life. It is the embodiment of one's individual wisdom, charm, cultivation and communicative techniques. In everyday communication, it could ameliorate the interpersonal relationship and improve the communicative atmosphere. And there is no denying that humor is an indispensable part of life.Centuries have witnessed the study on humor from a variety of disciplines such as philosophy, aesthetics, sociology, psychology, anthropology, etc. And in recent years, the linguistic research on humor, especially from the point of pragmatics, is appealing to growing scholars. The domain of the study on humor is becoming broader. However, according to the study on humor before, it seems that few theories could well explain how humorous utterances are generated. In this thesis, the author will provide a new perspective for the research on humor and attempt to account for the production of humor from the perspective of vague theory.Since the American scholar L.A.Zadeh proposes the famous Fuzzy Set Theory in 1960s, many scholars start to devote themselves to the study of vagueness in language from the angles of semantics, pragmatics, rhetoric, psychology, etc, and make great achievements in this field. At the same time, scholars not only concern the study on vagueness, they also apply vague theory into the analysis of other language phenomenon such as political diplomacy, news report, advertisement, etc. This thesis will probe into humor from vague theory and see how vague theory explains the generative mechanism of humor.According to vague theory, the generation of humor is the process in which the producer creates humorous utterances by using the vague area. The situation comedy is a genre of comedy performance, and as a carrier of humor, it has provided plenty of materials for the research of humor. This thesis takes the famous American sitcom Friends as a corpus-based study and analyzes the verbal humor sample on the basis of vague theory. To ensure the objectivity and effectiveness of the research, this thesis chooses three episodes of each season of Friends as the corpus, and applies the qualitative and quantitative analysis to study the humorous utterances in the thirty episodes, and reaches the conclusion: compared with phonetic and semantic vagueness, pragmatic vagueness plays a much more important role in the generative mechanism of the humorous utterances.This thesis has both theoretical and practical significance. Theoretically, firstly, this thesis takes the vague theory as the theoretical basis and gives a comprehensive and detailed analysis of the humor involved in the sitcom Friends, and further develops the mechanism of humor production within the framework of vague theory, which is different from the previous studies on humor, and broadens the scope of theoretical research on humor and situation comedy to a certain degree. Secondly, it attempts to apply the vague theory into the analysis of the generative strategies of the humorous utterances in Friends, which expands the boundary of the applicability of vague theory. Practically, it would help people to understand and appreciate humor more easily.