An Adaptation-Relevance Approach To Verbal Humor In The Sitcom Ipartment

Humor is observable in many spheres and aspects of our daily life. Researches on humor have such a long history which can be traced back to the times of Plato and Aristotle. All through the years, it has always been a hot issue attracting scholars from various disciplines both at home and abroad. And meanwhile, many linguistics and philosophers have their own understanding and put forwards their own theories on humor.Based on the achievements made by the previous studies, the present study explores the verbal humor in the sitcom Ipartment in the light of Adaptation-Relevance Model in order to reveal the feasibility of this model as well as to find out whether the suggested model holds the same adequate explanatory and descriptive power by using the resources selected from Ipartment. The sitcom was born in America but have a great influence on China. As a special type of comedy performance, it largely counts on verbal humor to create the general effect of the play. Among others, once broadcast, the Ipartment attracts more attention especially among the younger generation. And the humorous and witty dialogues which can be easily found all through the play make it an ideal source of data for this research.Obviously, Relevance Theory and Adaptation Theory have theoretical advantages of their own, while each can only partially account for the verbal humor. Adaptation Theory only stresses the importance of making linguistic choice while lacks solid theoretical foundation and neglects the important role played by inference in understanding humorous meaning. Relevance Theory explains how to infer implicature but the concept "Relevance" is too subjective to be supported theoretically. Therefore, the present study puts emphasis on the synthetic survey on humor from an angle few has ever touched upon before by integrating the two theories into one whole promising one.Including the introduction, this thesis consists of five chapters.The first chapter is the introduction. In this part, the author gives a brief introduction of the purpose and significance, and data source and practical method of the study.The second chapter claims the reviews of the sitcom Ipartment, humor especially the nature of it which displays three different famous theories, and modern linguistic approaches to humor at home and abroad respectively.The third chapter specifically explains the application of the two great theories Relevance Theory and Adaptation Theory respectively in the sitcom Ipartment and meanwhile points out the merits and demerits on the descriptive power of the two theories.The fourth chapter, playing the major role of the whole thesis, illustrates the application of the Adaptation-Relevance Model by using the resources selected from Ipartment, for the purpose of exploring feasibility of this model as well as to find out whether the suggested model holds the same adequate explanatory and descriptive power.The fifth chapter is about limitations and conclusion. It offers the major findings as well as the limitations of the research. This tentative application of the model to the analysis of verbal humor in sitcoms enriches the existing studies of Adaptation-Relevance Model, but the research based on the relatively new framework is in the initial phase and still in desperate need of further verification and revision in the future research.