| Humor is ubiquitous in our lives. Due to its frequent presence in multifarious literary forms, many linguistic scholars explore humorous discourse from various perspectives such as pragmatics, stylistics, language translation and culture. Contrastive analysis of the interpersonal meaning of humorous discourse is still a fresh topic in linguistic studies. Interpersonal meaning involves how to establish relationship and express the speaker’s status, attitude and motivation by the choices of words. Based on Halliday’s interpersonal meaning theory and Martin’s appraisal theory, with humorous discourse in American sitcom Friends and Chinese sitcom My Own Swordsman as its case study source, we combine quantitative and qualitative analysis to study humorous discourse in this thesis.Three research questions are addressed:1) How do mood, modality and appraisal theory are respectively used to realize the interpersonal meaning in Chinese and English humorous discourse? 2) What are the similarities and differences in the realization of interpersonal meaning by mood, modality and appraisal theory in English and Chinese humorous discourse? 3) What accounts for the similarities and differences in the realization of interpersonal meaning in English and Chinese humorous discourse?Through the contrastive analysis, it is found that there are similarities in English and Chinese humorous discourse in realization of interpersonal meaning. Firstly, the same linguistic mechanism is utilized to create humorous effect. To be humorous, the actors in the two sitcoms subtly choose sentence types to narrate the stories, especially the declarative mood. Secondly, people always prefer mood adjuncts to comment adjuncts in both languages because mood adjuncts can show the orientation of implicit objective meaning and comment adjuncts can express the orientation of implicit subjective meaning. Thirdly, there are more positive evaluations than negative ones in both American and Chinese humorous discourses, because positive attitude helps to maintain the two sides’ positive face.As the two sitcoms come from different cultural backgrounds, there exist some different linguistic characteristics. First of all, English and Chinese have different mood system, especially the interrogative mood structure. Chinese interrogative mood even can be classified into several sub-categories. Next, there are more low value modals in English, and rather less median value modals in Chinese. In composing the modal adjuncts, Chinese mood adjunct and comment adjunct both take a higher position than English ones, whereas negative mood adjuncts account for more frequency in English than that in Chinese. Finally, in the framework of appraisal theory, English sitcom keeps a higher percentage of affect than Chinese sitcom. Moreover, Chinese people always prefer to the superposition of idioms so as to appraise other person or thing.The investigation of the interpersonal meaning of humorous discourse can be seen as an overlapping study between the interpersonal meaning and the humor in conversational discourse. It is hoped that this tentative contrastive analysis of interpersonal meaning will provide enlightenment to the studies on humorous discourse in TV sitcoms. In daily conversation, using the humorous expressions with specific semantic systems of interpersonal meaning, people may usually strengthen the relationship and people from different cultural background can understand each other and communicate better. Next, with the theoretical support playwrights also can enhance the humorous effect for the scenario. Finally, the researcher hopes this study will be helpful to classroom teaching and translating humorous discourses in films or teleplays. |
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