On The Production Mechanism Of Linguistic Humor In Growing Pains-from The Perspective Of Pragmatic Presupposition Theory

Humor is an amusing and thought-provoking linguistic phenomenon which exists in many aspects of human life, such as daily communication, TV programs, literature works, advertising, etc. As the fruit of human thoughts and wit, humor not only brings happiness and laughter but also enlivens atmosphere, eases clashes and promotes the relationships among communicative participants. The good sense of humor often represents a person’s nice character and communicative ability. Sitcom always aims at creating humor and comic effects and let people get illuminated in the laughter. It can be adopted as beneficial material or linguistic corpus for the humor study. Through centuries, humor has been explored and studied by researchers in different domains and has gradually become an interdiscipline. In terms of linguistics, humor has been studied from the aspects of Polite Principle, Relevance Theory, Conceptual Blending Theory, etc. Growing Pains was a classic American situation comedy which enjoyed high popularity among audience both in America and China for its abundant humorous language, the parents’heuristic way of educating kids, and each children’s distinguishing character and their confusions and growth, but this sitcom has not been studied from the perspective of pragmatic presupposition.On the basis of the previous linguistic studies, this thesis aims at analyzing linguistic humor in Growing Pains under the theory of pragmatic presupposition to find out the mechanism that triggers linguistic humor in it, so as to let people better understand, enjoy, use and create humor. The concept of presupposition, types of presupposition triggers, and the commonly-employed pragmatic presupposition strategies will be explained in detail in this thesis. Based on the four features of pragmatic presupposition employed, that is, mutual knowledge, appropriateness, defeasibility and subjectivity, and three presupposition strategies, namely, presupposition setting, preserved presupposition and false presupposition, detailed analysis on the humorous conversation selected from the Growing Pains will be made. The following questions will be probed into:1) Is it feasible to illustrate the linguistic humor in Growing Pains from the perspective of pragmatic presupposition? 2) If it is feasible, how are pragmatic presuppositions employed in Growing Pains to trigger humor and generate comic effects and what can we benefit from this analysis?This research is a qualitative research, and the linguistic data of this analysis are all collected from the sitcom Growing Pains. Growing Pains contains seven seasons with 166 episodes in total. This study mainly focuses on the first three seasons, from which 40 episodes were selected for the study and 27 dialogues were picked out for the detailed analysis of how the linguistic humor in this sitcom was realized. The background laughter of the audience in the sitcom was taken as signs that a linguistic humor was generated. During the analysis, the relation between features of pragmatic presupposition and the linguistic humor will be firstly studied, and then the relation between pragmatic presupposition strategies and linguistic humor will be further probed into.Through careful analysis, following conclusions are reached in the thesis:(1) The four features of the pragmatic presupposition and its three frequently-used presupposition strategies are all well and effectively employed by the characters in the sitcom Growing Pains to let humorous effects arise. (2) Through the analysis, the linguistic humor can be generated mainly in two ways based on the pragmatic presupposition theory:one is when characters in the sitcom produce some utterances, some presuppositions may be contradictory with the fact or the speaker’s true feelings or mental state. Audience perceive his or her true thoughts and feelings, and see the incongruity between the utterances and true feelings, and feel very laughable. The other is that the speaker in the sitcom can produce some utterances which are contradictory with hearers’ or audience’s presupposition and make them so surprised that humor is generated due to the striking contrast between the speaker’s utterances and hearers or audience’s presupposition or expectation.It is hoped that this study has two major significance: one is to help people better understand and enjoy the linguistic humor in English sitcoms or movies, enhancing their capacity of using and creating humor. The other is to broaden English linguistics learners’ vision and understanding of pragmatic presupposition theory.