An Analysis Of The Verbal Humor In Sitcom Ipartment From The Perspective Of The Cooperative Principle

Humor exists widely in our daily life. For tens of thousand years, many scholars have been absorbed in the researches of humor from all kinds of fields, such as philosophy, sociology, aesthetics, anthropology, psychology, etc. With the development of pragmatics, more and more scholars start to study the humor language from the perspective of pragmatics. The sitcom as one of the most popular TV programs supplies enough materials for the studies of humor language, because the humor dialogues play an important role in creating scripts. As a representative work of Chinese sitcoms, Ipartment attracts more attention of the young people. Therefore, it is considered as the best resource of the corpus of the thesis naturally. After reading the related literature, the author finds that the applied research of humor language under the framework of the Cooperative Principle in Ipartment IV is rare now.The Cooperative Principle is firstly proposed by H. P. Grice. He thinks the utterances in daily communication aren’t in a mass but follow certain invisible principles which evolve into the Cooperative Principle later. However, people often flout the maxims of CP in the real communication. In the linguistic communication, the speaker deliberately and openly flouts the maxims, which makes the hearer have to infer the connotative information depending on the specific context. Thus, the extra meaning which is inferred in that way is named as particularized implicature(He Ziran & Ran Yongping, 2010: 80). In another words, the process of inferring the implicature is just the process of understanding the humor language. Therefore, in the process of appreciating the humor language, firstly we need to understand the literal meaning of it, then we should analyze which maxim does it flout, at last we infer the implicature by abstract thought, taking the context and background knowledge into the consideration. Only in that way can we enjoy the essence of humor language.In this thesis, the author analyzes the humor dialogues in Ipartment IV in detail under the framework of the CP and tries to discover the mechanism of the generation of humor language and the motives of the characters. At the same time, the study on the motives of the characters who flout the CP is also the original and innovative exploration of the author. The thesis applies the approach of the combination of the qualitative and quantitative analysis. The author will apply the quantitative analysis to calculate the numbers and proportions of every situation of flouting the maxims. Besides, the author will apply the qualitative analysis to study how humor language is generated by flouting the maxim respectively. Through the analysis, the author draws the conclusion: Firstly, among the total situations, in the way of the generation of humor language in the sitcoms, flouting the maxim of quality is the most frequent way. Next to it are the maxims of relation and manner. Among the situations of flouting the maxim of quality, the most frequently used rhetorical devices are the metaphor and hyperbole. Secondly, the verbal humor in this sitcom are mostly generated by flouting the maxims of the CP intentionally, therefore the process of understanding the verbal humor is just the process of inferring the corresponding particularized implicature. Thirdly, through the further study, the author finds the reasons why the characters in the sitcom flouts the maxims of CP are various, such as saving one’s face, satirizing the others, satisfying one’s own vanity, strengthening the persuasion or mood, etc.