A Comparative Study On The Explanatory Power For Verbal Humor In Growing Pains From The Perspective Of Cooperative Principle And Relevance Theory

Humor is considered, to some extent, as the expression of the speaker’s wisdomand attitude towards life. Bringing individuals enormous fun, it is also a means ofresolving interpersonal conflicts. Therefore, the cognitive interpretation of thehumorous language has become one of the significant research fields.This paper aims to analyze the instances of humor in U.S. sitcom Growing Painswith the Cooperative Principle as well as the Relevance Theory as the theoreticalframework to explore process of the cognitive interpretation, comparing theexplanatory power of the two theories and making assessment of the difference. Thispaper mainly deals with the following research questions. Firstly, how can we analyzethe internal mechanism of producing humorous language? Secondly, from whatperspectives can we assess the difference between the two theories?The data used in my research are from U.S. sitcom Growing Pains and qualitativeresearch method of data analysis is taken. The major findings are as following: firstly,the differences between the two theories lie in the following aspects: the theoreticalfoundation, the theoretical models, the inferential models, the definitions of themeaning and context, etc. Secondly, differences lie in the creating mechanisms ofhumor. Thirdly, the interpretations of figures of speech in humorous language differnoticeably.The significance of the research goes to the following: Firstly, it is an effectivemethod to analyze the verbal humor from two perspectives, enriching theacknowledgment of both theories and humorous language. Secondly, it is beneficial toanalyze other language phenomena while noticing the advantage and disadvantage ofthe two theories respectively. Thirdly, the findings of the research can be applied to theteaching process to instruct students’ ability of understanding humor, meanwhile thecomparison between domestic sitcoms and exotic sitcoms can be conducted based onthe research.The inadequacies of this article lie in the limited corpus and the incomprehensive analysis of that. The continuous research work concerning text analysis is about to beconducted to make them up.