An Adaptive Study On The Humor In Home With Kids Ⅰ

Within the framework of Adaptation Theory put forward by Verschueren in 1999, the thesis studies the generation of humor in the situation comedy Home with Kids I from the following two angles:the adaptation to the linguistic structures and the adaptation to the communicative contexts. In this thesis, the relative linguistic choices and strategies chosen by the main characters in the process of generating humor are analyzed in detail. From the angle of the adaptation to the linguistic structures, the thesis analyzes the humorous language and pragmatic strategies of the relative characters at the sound, lexical, syntactic and discourse levels. From the angle of the adaptation to the communicative contexts, the thesis focuses on the methods that the relative characters choose to generate humor when they try to adapt to the physical world(time, space and physical appearance), the social world(social relationship, social etiquette and social background) and the mental world(personality, emotion, belief and motivation). Based on the above analysis, it shows that the humor in situation comedies results from the fact that the characters make appropriate linguistic choices by means of adapting to the specified linguistic structures and communicative contexts. The significance of the thesis is that it explains dynamically the humor in situation comedies and that it also shows the explanatory power of Adaptation Theory.The thesis consists of three parts. The first part is the introduction and the third part is the conclusion of the thesis. The second part is the body of the thesis, which consists of three chapters. Chapter one introduces some basic knowledge related to humor, the achievements and some existing problems of the previous studies on humor. Chapter two introduces Verschueren's Adaptation Theory and builds up an adaptive framework for the present study, which focuses on two aspects:the adaptation to the linguistic structures and the adaptation to the communicative contexts. Chapter three applies Adaptation Theory to the analysis of the humorous dialogues extracted from Home with Kids I.