A Stylistic Analysis On The American Sitcom The Big Bang Theory

Modern stylistics flourished in the1960s. Since then, poetry and fiction, the two formsof literature, have been the focus of stylistic study, especially poetry. It has stimulated theinterest of many stylisticians. However, less attention has been paid to the stylistic study ofdrama, and fewer relevant studies can be found. Stylistic analysis of sitcoms, the new form ofdrama which develops itself with the popularity of television, is even less. The previous studyon sitcom is mainly about the study of the translation of the scripts and the study of thehumorous language. Therefore, the current study is very necessary.The corpus studied in this thesis was taken from the popular American sitcom-The BigBang Theory, which has six complete seasons by now. One episode was chosen from eachseason by random sampling. The study aims to explore the stylistic features of the sitcomfrom the phonological, lexical, semantic, syntactic and pragmatic levels and interpret thestylistic effects that are achieved by those observed features. Based on both quantitative andqualitative methods, this study analyzed the stylistic features quantitatively and gave aqualitative interpretation of their effects with the help of analytical tools, including Cool EditPro2.0, Range6.0, Microsoft Excel2010, and Microsoft Word2010.The following results were obtained after the stylistic analysis of The Big Bang Theory:At the phonological level, it is found that in general this play presents two features: thefast speaking rate of characters and the remarkable use of non-native pronunciation areapplied. Besides, local features are also spotted, which are plot-specific, including voicequality variation, paronomastic pun, alliteration, end rhyme, and strange pronunciation; at thelexical level, apart from common vocabularies, academic words, words and phrases related toscience and technology, sci-fi films, games and comic books and vulgar words have theirrespective unique stylistic effects in this play; at the semantic level, semantic transference,semantic absurdity, semantic deception and semantic ambiguity are applied. To be morespecific, some figures of speech, namely simile, metaphor, paradox, oxymoron, hyperbole,understatement, irony and homographic pun are used; at the syntactic level, it is observed thatbecause minor sentences and simple sentences are the majority, the use of compoundsentences, complex sentences and compound-complex sentences is contrasted against thesentence “norm” of this play. Similarly, the stylistic effects of long sentences and passivesentences are also emphasized due to the bulk use of short sentences and active sentences; atthe pragmatic level, the results show that violations of Cooperative Principle’s four maximsare quite common. There are178times of violations in total. The most frequently violatedmaxim is The Maxim of Quality. The violation of The Maxim Quality accounts for53.93%ofthe total violations, followed by The Maxim of Relation,17.98%, and The Maxim of Quantity, 15.17%and The Maxim of Manner,12.92%. The conversational implicature in the play canbe well interpreted by Cooperative Principle. What should also be noted is that the characterSheldon exceeds other characters by a large margin in the use of academic words, longsentences and passive sentences, which successfully portrays his image as a science weirdoand leaves a deep impression on audience.Through analysis and discussion, the author discovers that those features listed abovecreate diversified artistic effects to the play. They highlight the personalities of characters,thus displaying the value, significance and positive roles stylistic knowledge has incharacterization. This thesis has enlarged the research scope of stylistics, and made a goodattempt in the application of stylistic analysis. Meanwhile, the results of this study may alsobe beneficial to pedagogical stylistics by enriching students’ stylistic knowledge andimproving their pragmatic competence. Last but not the least, this thesis provides a freshperspective for the appreciation of theatrical art, and helps audience deepen theirunderstanding towards this form of art, thus further promoting its development.