A Study Of The Verbal Humor In Sitcom Two Broke Girls From A Perspective Of Pragmatic Presupposition

Humor, as a special language phenomenon, can be seen everywhere in literature, film and television, advertisement and daily communication. The language phenomenon of humor has attracted much attention from scholars in various fields. The domestic and foreign scholars have studied humor in the fields of psychology, philosophy, sociology, rhetoric and anthropology. Since 1980 s, domestic and foreign scholars have studied the humor in the field of linguistics. As one of the humor carriers, the situation comedy provides a rich corpus for the pragmatic study of humor.The ubiquitous humor in Two Broke Girls makes it one of the most popular American sitcoms. The sitcom tells about a story in which a restaurant waitress Max carves out through selling cupcakes with a rich girl Caroline who was reduced to a waitress because her wealthy father has gone bankrupt. In this thesis, the author has selected forty-eight episodes from the second and third season of the situation comedy Two Broke Girls as the research data, and made an exhaustive analysis of the verbal humor invoked by pragmatic presupposition.Nowadays studies on verbal humor in Two Broke Girls are mostly done from a perspective of speech act theory, especially cooperative principle, politeness principle and relevance theory to explain humor.In this thesis, the presupposition theory is applied to analyze the generation mechanism and effects of the verbal humor in Two Broke Girls from a perspective of pragmatics. Through the research, it is found that presupposition triggers can trigger presupposition, which produces humor. The lexical presupposition triggers are shown as definite descriptions, factual verbs, implicative verbs, change-of-state verbs, iteratives and verbs of judging, etc. The syntactic presupposition triggers are shown as structures and expressions indicating comparison, cleft sentences, adverbial clauses of time, non-restrictive attribute clauses, counter-factual conditionals and questions. The features of the verbal humor of pragmatic presupposition in the sitcom are appropriateness, mutual knowledge, one-sidedness, and subjectivity. The percentage of the four types of pragmatic presupposition and the distribution of the presupposition triggers are also analyzed detailedly. Concerning the respective percentage the presupposition triggers take in the data analysis of the thesis, the definite descriptions, the factive verbs and the comparisons and contrasts take a relatively large proportion, while the change-of-verbs, iterative and adjuncts, the non-restrictive attributive clauses and the others are in a small proportion.Regarding the generation mechanism of the verbal humor, it is shown that the verbal humor is invoked by preserved presupposition, cancelled presupposition, false presupposition and contradicted presupposition. Firstly, the speaker usually changes language expressions in order to avoid embarrassing situations, but the rearranged expression preserves the previous presupposition, thus humor arises. Secondly, the presupposition embedded in the utterance can sometimes be cancelled by the latter statement. The sudden overturn is always made out of the expectation of the audience, thus producing humorous effect. Thirdly, the presupposition made by the addresser is not sensed by the addressee appropriately. The unintentionally misunderstanding produces false presupposition, but the intentionally misunderstanding constitutes contradicted presupposition and the humor arises at the same time. The use of verbal humor in the sitcom has achieved very prominent effect. For one thing, it fully defines the personalities of the characters, such as Max’s personality of being tough, casual and open and Caroline’s personality of being principled, decorous and resolute. For another, the theme of this sitcom has been strengthened such as their optimistic attitude and the adherence to their dreams. Meanwhile, the American social ideology from the aspects of political view, moral view and life view is also revealed.Though limitations inevitably exist in the study, it bears some theoretical and practical significance. The thesis has made analysis on verbal humor from a perspective of pragmatic presupposition, which has revealed a strong explanatory power of the theory. Moreover, the study of humor in Two Broke Girls can not only show the essence of language arts, but also bring some inspiration to the future comic creation.