A Study Of Verbal Humor In The Big Bang Theory From The Perspective Of Adaptation Theory

Verbal humor is a common language phenomenon in daily life, and it performsimportant functions in personal interaction. At all times and in all over the world, scholarsfrom every field have shown keen interest in it. Therefore, there is no interruption inresearches and their findings concerning verbal humor. Since modern time, researches inverbal humor gradually changes from the fields of psychology, sociology, physiology to thefield of linguistics. Various researches and explorations have been made by experts andscholars in the field of linguistics. These researches mainly focus on the aspects of rhetoric,semantics, translation and pragmatics. From the point of research development, the research ischanging from rhetoric and semantics to translation and pragmatics slowly and in themeanwhile tends to be studied comprehensively in the context. As a form of language, verbalhumor does require us to interpret and analyze it from the real context rather than in isolation.The context here does not only refer to the linguistic context but also the communicativecontext, which includes every aspect related to verbal humor.Based on the previous researches on verbal humor, this thesis adopts the adaptationtheory as the theoretical framework and analyzes verbal humor from the popular Englishsituation comedy The Big Bang Theory as data from two aspects: the linguistic contextadaptation and the communicative context adaptation. Through the analysis of examples, thisthesis finds that verbal humor can achieve its humorous effect by cohesion, intertextuality andsequencing on the one hand, more specifically, the ways of cohesion include repetition,substitution, contrast and logical relation; the ways of intertextuality include themeintertextuality and type intertextuality and the way of sequencing is sequence setting. On theother hand, verbal humor can give humorous effect through mental world, social world andphysical in communicative context adaptation. Specifically speaking, there are personality,motivation, desire in mental world, culture and courtesy in social world and time and space inphysical world. Through the above ways, verbal humors adapt to linguistic context andcommunicative context and realize the humorous effect in the meanwhile. This thesis alsofinds that sometimes the way of adaptation of verbal humor is not exclusive to each other, butintertwined.