A Study Of Verbal Humor In Friends From The Perspectives Of Markedness Iconicity And Frame Theories

Humor plays an important role in people's lives. Humor not only can relieve the embarrassed atmosphere, improve people's relationship, enrich people's life, but also can be applied to English teaching and learning. Many scholars have studied humor from the perspectives of sociology, psychology, linguistics, artists, etc. In the discipline of linguistics, most are studies from the perspective of pragmatics, semantics, and rhetoric. Cognitive linguistics is newly springing up in China. Most of the researches about humor from the perspective of cognitive linguistics have done with one theoretical framework. For example, Zou Xingju uses the frame theory to analyze humor briefly(2010).Because of the differences of cultural and language between Chinese and English, the verbal humor in Friends hinder English learner's understandings about it to a certain extent. This thesis analyzes the verbal humor examples from the 10th season of Friends, taking the background laugh sound in the video as the indicator of humor. This thesis attempts to analyze the verbal humor in Friends from the new model which integrated Frame Theory and Markedness iconicity and Frame theory.This study includes two steps: first, single theory analyzing step; second, integrating theories analyzing step. We find Markedness Iconicity can reflect the extra meaning, context effects and the related degree of relatedness and can be applied to explain humor;It is too generous and vague to reflect the dynamic construe of verbal humor used in Friends. At the same time, we find that Frame Theory is the necessary and sufficient conditions of humor creation, but it cannot explain the reason that why frames switch. Thus it is not-all-inclusive to interpret humor only with the frame theory. Because the two theories are complementary, and have a shared context as their interface, this thesis integrates the two theories together in the second step, then uses the model of the integrated theory to explain the humor of Friends. The purpose of this thesis is to improve English learners'ability to understand verbal humor, and apply it to English teaching and learning class.Another significant meaning is to find that using only frame theory or Iconicity is not enough to interpret the reason that why humor produces.All in all, this thesis finds that using the integrated model of the Markedness Iconicity and the Frame theory to analyze the verbal humor is an effective measure which can improve the ability to understand verbal humor. At last, this thesis provides further implications for the possibility of using humor in English teaching and learning.