A Study Of Verbal Humor In Friends From The Perspective Of Cooperative Principle

The study of humorous phenomenon has become one of the hottest topics in all languages and cultures. It can be studied from various branches of the linguistic field, however the pragmatic study of verbal humor is a major direction in recent years. As is known to all, humorous conversations most frequently appear in situation comedies. Recently, numerous American situation comedies swarm into China and attract the attention of many young people. One of the most popular and successful sitcoms is Friends, which is considered as the milestone in the history of comedy series. Therefore, this thesis tries to carry out an in-depth analysis of the funny and humorous conversations appeared in Friends on the basis of Cooperative Principle.The Cooperative Principle is proposed by Grice, which consists of four maxims:the quality maxim, the quantity maxim, the relation maxim, as well as the manner maxim. Each of the four maxims involves one or more sub-maxims. The first three maxims are all about "what is delivered in the process of communication", however, the manner maxim focuses on "how to convey the message in the process of communication". According to Grice, these maxims guide people’s behaviors, and the speaker and hearer are required to try their best to coordinate with each other in order to achieve a successful and efficient communication. However, in the real talk exchange, people do not always adhere to these maxims. They often violate them intending to achieve certain conversational implicature. It is clear that sometimes the speaker does violate a certain maxim, yet at a deeper level the Cooperative Principle can still be thought to be upheld. In this thesis, the author provides a detailed analysis of the violation, and the humorous effects generated by violating the maxims are also taken into consideration.In this thesis, such questions as how verbal humor is generated and how to appreciate verbal humor will be exploited by the author from the perspective of Grice’s Cooperative Principle. First of all, the author provides a brief introduction to humor, especially verbal humor, as well as the four maxims of Cooperative Principle. Based on this pragmatic theory, the author makes a careful data collection and statistic analysis of the humorous utterances appeared in American sitcom Friends. The finding shows that there exists close relationship between verbal humor and CP, and most of the humorous effects are achieved by the speakers through violating the maxims of Cooperative Principle intentionally or unintentionally. During the analytical process, both quantitative and qualitative methods are employed. In the process of the quantitative analysis, the distributions of verbal humor and situational humor in Friends are presented in a table. The results indicate that violation of the quality maxim is of the highest probability. The second most frequently violated maxim is the manner maxim. Next is the quantity maxim, while the relation maxim is the least frequently violated. In the qualitative analysis, the author makes an exhaustively complete interpretation of verbal humor in Friends. He assumes that the realization of humorous effect also depends on the use of rhetoric devices. The rhetoric devices referred to in the quality maxim include irony, metaphor and hyperbole. Aposiopesis, allusion and rhetorical question are involved in the quantity maxim. In the relation maxim, there is euphemism. As for manner maxim, there are repetition, pun and paradox. Verbal humor generated by violating more than one maxims is also discussed. In the process of analysis, each maxim is followed by examples, through which the humorous implicatures are illustrated vividly.Finally, the author firmly believes that the current research can help people appreciate American humor better and improve their cross-cultural communicative competence.