| Humor plays an important role in our lives, because it can amuse people and provide a way of improving relationship between people. Ever since its appearance, scholars from different fields have been interested in it and started to study it. In the second chapter of this thesis, the author introduced three famous and conventional theories, which studies humor from psychological, cognitive and social angles,In fact, linguists started to set foot on humor in 1980s. So far, the number of humor researches is considerable and is still growing. Yet among them, the application of discourse analysis to humor study is not comparable. Therefore, the author decided to analyze humor from the perspective of discourse analysis.The data is extracted from the famous sitcom Friends, due to its popularity among English learners. This thesis tries to help learners overcome the barriers humor sets in understanding, appreciating the sitcom as well as the language and culture through exploring the mechanisms of humor generation.Speech Act Theory includes locutionary act, illocutionary act and perlocutionary act. When the hearer fails to understand the illocutionary act or gives the unexpected perlocutionary act, humor is generated. According to Frame Theory, people usually store their memory of stereotype knowledge, so if the participants have various frames for one linguistic "fact", it can also draw forth humorous effect. In terms of cohesion, one of the most outstanding features of discourse, humor can be generated by failing to see the connections within the discourse or employing lexical cohesion in a wrong way. Besides, people need to bear in mind the Cooperative Principle and the Politeness Principle when they are in a conversation. Therefore, the unconsciously or intentionally flouting of these principles and their maxims will give rise to humorous effect. When it comes to the social context, the author applies Halliday and Hasan’s theory of situational context as well as the context of culture. They have great impact on learners’understanding of a discourse, and also on the generation and interpretation of humor.Through careful and meaningful analysis of the humorous discourses, the author would like to see that this thesis could give inspirations to some sitcom writers; offer some help to people who are researching humor; help learners interpret humor to some degree; help audiences and learners appreciate the sitcom, the language and the culture. |
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