A Study Of Humorous Speech Act In American Sitcom

Being a special kind of language arts and a linguistic phenomenon, humor ispenetrated into every aspect of life, playing an important role in English culture. In recentyears, the U.S. sitcoms have been introduced into China in different ways and have a hugeimpact on our country. With the corpus of American sitcom The Big Bang Theory, thepaper attempts to explore the deep-rooted reasons accounting for this means throughanalyze the humorous speech from the perspective of speech act theory.Based on J. Austin’s speech act theory and J.K. Searle’s contribution to theclassification of illocutionary acts, the study regards the humor as a speech act which iseliciting—laughter. Also, it is discussed taking into consideration of the communication,context and other factor which proposed by Mey (2003), including the level of pragmaticbehavior. From Tan Daren (1997)’s point view, the speech is constrained by four kinds ofrules: the language rules, the rhetoric rules, logic rules, and communication rules. Thehumorous speech is no exception. While studying the collected statistics from The BigBang Theory, the analysis of the means and reasons of English humorous speech actimplementation is conducted from a much broader perspective. It is also discussed how thehumorous speech act to launch its cause laughter illocutionary force which is the key issueof the study.The findings shows that the successful implementation of the humorous dialogues inThe Big Bang Theory mainly rely on the widely use of language means in thecommunication process, including the levels of phonological means, lexical means,semantic means and rhetorical means. Abiding to or violating some logical rules orcommunicative rules are also play important role in generating humor. In addition, it is alsoneed a certain cultural background knowledge to acquire a smooth and properinterpretation and appreciation of the humorous speech acts.This finding of the study has provided some useful suggestions for people tocomprehend and appreciate the verbal humor and also for English teaching and cross-cultural communications.