Verbal Humor In American Sitcoms From A Pragmatic Perspective

Humor can be classified into physical humor and verbal humor, the latter of which is the kind of humor this thesis tries to explore."Humor" refers to "verbal humor" in this thesis unless otherwise specified. Verbal humor is an art of language. According to their own unique understanding about life, people express their true viewpoint or attitude concisely, vividly, visually and humorously, which brings infinite fun and memories. The explanation of "humor" in Wikipedia is:Humor is the tendency of particular cognitive experience to provoke laughter and provide amusement.Verbal humor is also a special language phenomenon. Although scholars have been keen on humor research for a long time, many of them studied the verbal humor only from the rhetorical and semantic perspective. Since the1980s, with the development of pragmatics, more and more linguists have made great contribution to the humor research from the perspective of pragmatics. Furthermore, the popularity of sitcom which is the carrier of verbal humor has provided plenty of materials for pragmatics research of verbal humor.Recently, one of the most famous American sitcom Modern Family has achieved great success in Emmy Awards; this is another fantastic sitcom after Friends. Modern Family, as a family sitcom, involves the lives and situations of a family, usually taking place inside their house or residence. There are usually24episodes in each season. Each episode lasts around22minutes and is filled with amusing scenes, which is a typical feature of sitcom.Modern Family won14nominations at the62nd session of the United States of America Emmy Award (2010). It finally won four awards and became a big winner of the United States sitcoms. At the same time, at the68th session of the United States of America movie TV Golden Globe Awards, Modern Family also became a big winner of comedies by winning five awards in the end. At the63rd session of the United States of America Emmy Award (2011), it received17nominations and eventually swept5awards. Recently, at the64th session of the United States of America Emmy Award (2012), it also received4awards and once again ruled the roost. The performance of this sitcom at America Emmy Awards is amazing.Emmy Award (Emmy Awards) is the United States television industry’s highest award, comparable to Oscar in the field of movie industry.Based on the American sitcom Modern Family as the corpus, this thesis analyzes verbal humor from the perspective of pragmatics, including the Cooperative Principle, the Politeness Principle, the Face Strategy (the Face Principle), the Presupposition Theory, the Relevance Theory, and the Speech Act Theory. Through the analysis of lots of examples of English humor within the framework of pragmatics in Modern Family, this thesis explains how humorous effects are created through those pragmatic theories. For example, it is found that humorous effects can be produced when the violation of CP; if the cancellation of PT occurs, the comic effects can be produced, etc.This thesis is made up of three main parts:introduction, body and conclusion.The introduction mainly comprises the significance of the study, the object of the study, research methodology, and the structure of the study. Chapter Two is literature review and some brief information about the study of Modern Family in China. Chapter Three discusses verbal humor on two principles of pragmatic analysis, i.e. Cooperative Principle and Politeness and Face Principle as mentioned above. The generation of humor by applying these two principles has been illustrated in this chapter. Chapter Four analyzes and appreciates humor on the three theories, i.e. Presupposition Theory, Relevance Theory and Speech Act Theory. The last chapter is the conclusion of the whole thesis, including the summary of the thesis, the limitation of current study and suggestions for further study.This thesis is also helpful for us to learn English through the comprehension and appreciation of English humor, and improve our English application ability, providing meaningful reference for the creation of verbal humor in sitcoms.