An Analysis Of The Verbal Humor In Ipartment From The Perspective Of Pragmatics

Humor plays an important role in our daily life. Research on humor has always been a hot issue attracting scholars from various disciplines both domestic and overseas. More and more domestic scholars explain and analyze verbal humor with theories of pragmatics. Humor itself is not only the essential part of sitcoms but also the key to the success of the sitcom. A large quantity of dialogues involved in sitcoms provides abundant materials for analysis of verbal humor in the pragmatic way.Ipartment is a popular and successful sitcom. There are a series of humorous and love stories in Ipartment. While season I of Ipartment was broadcasting in Jiangxi TV Station in 2009, it attracted much attention from young people to old people. The conversations between the heroes and heroines in Ipartment are especially entertaining because they are so relaxing and humorous.Three theories of pragmatics Cooperative Principles(shortened as CP), Politeness Principle(shortened as PP) and Relevance Theory (shortened as RT) are adopted in this paper to analyze verbal humor in the sitcom Ipartment. The methodology used in this thesis is literature review and quantitative analysis. It is found that analyses of the humorous language used in Ipartment have further proved the explanatory power of these three theories in understanding humor.From the analysis, the author finds that verbal humor is produced by violating CP, violating or abiding PP and building the largest difference between maximal relevance and the optimal relevance in the sitcom Ipartment. However, each has its own merits and limitations:people could possibly appreciate humor in depth with CP; people tend to understand why some ideas have to be expressed in a roundabout way and sometimes violate or abide the maxims of PP to get the touch of humor; The author finds that humor which can be interpreted from the perspective of both RT and CP or RT and PP, RT seems to be more powerful; humor which cannot be interpreted from the perspective of CP can be interpreted with RT sometimes; humor which cannot be interpreted from the perspective of RT can be explained with CP. Therefore, the combination of these three theories provides the best framework for interpreting the cognitive process of humor understanding.Through the discussion and analysis of verbal humor, this paper gives a hand to people especially those who are learning Chinese language as a foreign language. Thus, they can better understand Chinese humor, enjoy Chinese sitcoms and promote the communication between Chinese and themselves. Meanwhile, this paper enlightens those who are working on Chinese language teaching and play writing to some extent.