A Study Of The Generative Mechanism Of Verbal Humor In Friends From The Perspective Of Pragmatic Ambivalence

Humor is pervasive in human life. Studies on humor have been carried out fromvarious disciplines, such as philosophy, psychology, linguistics, etc. In the pragmaticfield, pragmatic ambivalence is widely employed in our daily conversations and cansometimes act as a social lubricant. It has the capability of eliciting humor.In this thesis,20humorous texts extracted from the famous sitcom Friends areexamined to see if pragmatic ambivalence can give rise to humor and how thishappens. The scripts of the conversations are analyzed from four perspectives:(1)pragmatic multivalence and humor;(2) pragmatic bivalence/plurivalence and humor;(3) conditional bivalent illocutionary act and humor;(4) discoursal ambivalence andhumor. As a matter of fact, according to the incongruity theory, humor occurs whensomebody suddenly perceives the incongruity between what he/she expects and whatreally happens. Meanwhile, pragmatic ambivalence inherently contains incongruousfactors or under certain circumstances, it has the potential to create incongruity.Therefore, combined with the analyses of the verbal humor occurred in Friends, wecan safely come to the conclusion that there are interrelations between pragmaticambivalence and humor.