Metafunctional Approach To The Humorous Dialogues In The Bis Bane Theory

Humor is a typical quality, aptitude and means of communication of humanbeings. It makes our life more interesting. American situation comedy (sitcom) is avivid way to show American humor. It is one of the top-rated TV shows in America.Humorous style and everyday language are main sources of the popularity of Americansitcoms. Humor, especially verbal humor is the most important feature of sitcoms andalso the main mechanism to proceed. In sitcoms, what makes audience laugh is thedialogue between characters: the joke they tell, the witty remarks they make, thepoignant satire they use all are sources of humor. Dialogues in sitcoms often showcontradiction with environment, action and common sense. According to IncongruityTheory in psychology，humor is generated by the conflict or incongruity between whatwe expect to happen and what actually happened. Incongruity is something that does notseem to fit in with or be appropriate to its context. There are three general features ofincongruity-based humorous expressions:1.Conflict between what is expected and whatoccurs in the joke;2.The conflict is caused by some ambiguity at some level oflanguage;3.The punchline is surprising because it activates meaning which is notexpected, since it is not compatible or coherent with the rest of the joke, or discourse. Based on incongruity theory in psychology, this thesis focuses on the threemetafuncitons of systemic functional grammar and conducts an analysis of thefunctional structure and components in humorous dialogues in an American situationcomedy (sitcom). The data to be analyzed are all from an American sitcom--the BigBang Theory, in which verbal humor is the typical humor with American characteristics.The systemic functional grammar is presented by Halliday. It takes textual, social,psychological and cultural context into full consideration and provides insight into bothwritten and spoken language. Halliday interprets language development from afunctional point of view and formulates a functional theory of language, in which threemetafunctions of language is the essence. Analysis of linguistic feature of verbal humorin the thesis is under the category of three metafunctions--interpersonal function,ideational function and textual function，among which, mood system, transitivity systemand coherent system are the key focus. By detailed analyzing and statistics，the authorfinds out1. Among the three systems mentioned in the thesis, cohesive system is mostfrequently used in realizing humor.2.Of each sub-function, speech role and mood system almost take up the sameproportion of interpersonal function; under ideational system, relational processaccounts for more than half of the whole, followed by material process with theproportion of27%; circumstance and mental process are of the least frequency; undercohesive devices, lexical cohesion accounts for80%.3. Features A to T are linguistic features that contribute to the realization of humorof incongruity. Among them, features of A (Expected role or topic is changed.), J(Unexpected Attribute or Identifier), M (What is exploited by the conjunctive word isnot the same as what presupposed by the listener), N (The latter repeated one does notrefer to the same thing), O (Inappropriate or meaningless repetition), S (Unexpectedusing of antonyms) are the most prominent features, with frequencies over the averagelevel. The study is expected to help English learners to appreciate the sitcom better andimprove their ability in understanding the American humor.