A Study Of Verbal Humor In Modern Family From The Perspective Of Cooperative Principle

With the special artistic charm, various sitcoms occupy the important position in people’s daily entertainment life in recent years, such as Friends, Love Apartment, Modern Family, which are all familiar to the audience.Because of the novelty of its subject, Modern Family is becoming more and more popular since its beginning. There are not many related researches yet; the current study of humor in Modern Family is limited to the study from a macro perspective of pragmatics.This thesis lays emphasis on the analysis of verbal humor generating in Modern Family from the perspective of Cooperative Principle. The author hopes to enrich related exploration about humor in pragmatics with this thesis, so as to attract more studies to be done by more scholars about the analysis of verbal humor in sitcom. This thesis sets verbal humor in Modern Family as object of analyzing to boost the step of combining pragmatic theories with the hottest topic in society today showing the infinite charm of pragmatics from different aspects of the fast-paced modern life.By virtue of analyzing the verbal humor in it, it helps a lot to understand and learn humor in the exotic culture, so as to make more audiences learn more useful ideas and also feel about the positive energy from the different ways of dealing with the chores in life, and then represent more positive and active attitude toward their own lives. It can also benefit more people to profoundly and comprehensively know about the diversity lifestyles in the diverse American culture.Taking the Cooperative Principle and its maxims as the theoretical foundation, this thesis analyzes verbal humor in Modern Family by combining different strategies utilized in the violation of maxims.This thesis consists of three parts, introduction, body and conclusion.The first part is introduction. It begins with a general introduction of humor and its concerned studies, then comes the related studies of Cooperative Principle, the theoretical and practical significance are also listed which aims to reveals the necessity of this thesis.The second part is the main body which is divided into 5 chapters.Chapter I is literature review. Firstly, this thesis’ s theoretical framework Cooperative Principle is explained in detail, which includes Cooperative Principle and its four maxims. Secondly, Humor is introduced including its definition, related theories and concerned researches. It is helpful for readers to get more detailed and comprehensive understanding, and then get to know the importance of humor. Finally, for the reason that a clear understanding of the background information helps to understand the lines in brief conversations cited in this thesis, the source of corpus of this thesis, Modern Family is introduced briefly. It contains the main characters in it, relationships among each character and personalities of different character.Chapter II shows verbal humor in Modern Family generated from the violation of quantity maxim of the Cooperative Principle which demands the proper information, that is to say, the participants of conversation should offer neither more nor less information than needed in the conversation. This chapter is mainly about verbal humor generated from violating the maxim of quantity, it includes two sections. The first section deal with verbal humor generated from violating first sub-maxim of quantity, i.e. the speaker provides less information than needed in the conversation, by utilizing the form of ellipsis, metonymy and rhetoric question. The second section deal with verbal humor generated from violating the second sub-maxim of quantity, i.e. the speaker provides more information than needed in the conversation, through the form of euphemism.Chapter III focuses on verbal humor generated from violating quality maxim in the conversations of Modern Family from the perspective of Cooperative Principle. The maxim of quality requires speaker to provide authentic information in conversation, that is to say, participants of conversation do not offer neither false information nor rootless one. This chapter is divided into two sections to do the analysis. The first section deals with verbal humor generated from violating the first sub-maxim of quality, i.e. the speaker says what he or she believes to be false in the conversation, by utilizing the form of irony, satire, antonomasia, personification and innuendo. The second section deals with verbal humor generated from violating the second sub-maxim of quality, i.e. speaker says what lacks adequate evidence in the conversation, with the use of hyperbole.Chapter IV presents verbal humor generated by violating relation maxim in the dialogues of Modern Family from the perspective of the Cooperative Principle. According to the maxim of relation, speaker should provide relevant information in conversation, that is to say, the participants should not say something irrelevant. This chapter consists of two sections. The first section involves verbal humor generated from violating the maxim of relation through providing irrelevant information. The second section involves verbal humor generated from violating the maxim of relation by involving the use of topic change.Chapter V deals with verbal humor generated by violating manner maxim in the conversations of Modern Family from the perspective of Cooperative Principle. Manner maxim requires the speaker to be perspicuous in conversation, that is to say, obscurity and ambiguity of the utterance should be avoided in the conversation. This chapter is divided into four sections to analyze the verbal humor generated from violating manner maxim. The first section is about separately verbal humor generated from violating the first sub-maxim of relation, i.e. what speaker says should stay obscurity in the conversation, by utilizing the form of malapropism and parody. The second section is about verbal humor generated from violating the second sub-maxim of manner, i.e. what speaker says is ambiguity in the conversation, with the use of pun. The third section is about the verbal humor generated from violating the third sub-maxim of manner, i.e. the information speaker provides is redundant in the conversation, with the use of repetition. The fourth section is about the verbal humor generated from violating the fourth sub-maxim of manner, i.e. the information speaker provides in disorganized in the conversation, by utilizing the form of aposiopesis and paradox.The third part is the conclusion of the thesis which mainly summarizes the whole thesis. This part makes certain suggestions as well, analysis and studies of humor can be made from the other perspectives, the producing and receiving process of humor can also be analyzed from the speaker’s and hearer’s point of view, more factors can be included when analyzing the verbal humor.