A Contrastive Study On Pragmatic Strategies Of Humorous Speech Acts In Chinese And English Sitcoms

As an important component of humor, verbal humor pervades every aspect of our lives. And there must be some pragmatic strategies in the use of verbal humor. At present, studies on pragmatic strategies are mainly from the perspective of Cooperative Principle while we find few contrastive analyses on the pragmatic strategies of humorous utterances. The present thesis uses two sitcoms with similar theme as the corpus and carries out a comparative analysis on the similarities and differences of pragmatic strategies in both languages. And this thesis adopts Speech Act Theory (Searle, 1975) and Hay (2000)'s classification of functions of humor as the theoretical foundation.Austin classifies speech acts into the three categories of locutionary speech acts, illocutionary speech acts and perlocutionary speech acts, Searle makes adaptations based on Austin's classification and comes up with his version of the theory. This thesis selects randomly fifty similar scenes each from Ipartment and Friends and makes comparison about trends in the use of humorous speech acts in both sitcoms through analysis from the illocutionary and perlocutionary levels. Then, analysis and comparison of pragmatic strategies in the two sitcoms are made based on Hay's classification of pragmatic strategies of humorous utterances.Results of the study show that in Ipartment solidarities-based strategies are most frequently used, while aggression-based strategies are least frequently used. Besides, defense-based strategies appear much more often than aggression-based strategies, which means in friends'group, when faced with a threat to the face, people tend to protect themselves and avoid offending others. And in Friends the same tendency exists. The result is not surprising since the data for analysis come from conversations among friends. To look into details, the author finds that characters in Ipartment apply more solidarities-based strategies and aggression-based strategies than those in Friends, while they use comparatively fewer defense-based strategies. In sum, English and Chinese humor bear some similarities and differences. Both the Chinese and American would like to create humor by applying solidarity-based strategies and avoid aggression among friends.