A Pragmatic Study Of Verbal Humor In 2 Broke Girls

Humor plays an important role in our life. Humor is a kind of life consciousness. Humor is a kind of attitude of life. Humor is the presentation of life. With it, you usually get along with the society and people more harmoniously. The study of humor can date back to ancient Creek, when it was more than 2000 years ago. Many scholars made analysis about the causes and effects of humor from a variety of perspectives, such as sociology, psychology, rhetoric, philosophy and linguistics and so on. However, with the development of pragmatics, the study from linguistics came into a new stage. Many scholars attempted to study humor from the Cooperative Principle(CP), the Relevance Theory(RT), the Adaption Theory, the Memetics and so on.As a form of language art, originated from American, sitcoms are popular with the audience, because they have the laughable, amusing and humorous language style. Besides, sitcoms abound in humorous language. As a consequence, Situation comedy can be used as a corpus for the study of verbal humor from the perspective of pragmatics.The author based the study on Bergson‘s(1917) division on humor, the situational humor and the verbal humor, to explore the generation mechanism of verbal humor in 2 Broke Girls, employing Grice‘s Cooperative Principle(CP) and Sperber and Wilson‘s Relevance Theory(RT) as theoretical framework by analyzing a large number of humorous languages in the situation comedy 2 Broke Girls.This research employs traditional methods, both quantitative and qualitative. The quantitative analysis is used to show the percentage of the Cooperative Principle and the Relevance Theory in this sitcom, while the qualitative analysis is aimed at researching the generation mechanism of verbal humor in 2 Broke Girls.The results of the research are as follows: First, the research shows that the Cooperative Principles makes the verbal humor by violating the four maxims while the Relevance Theory takes effects of humor as the gap between maximal relevance and optimal relevance. Second, according to the comparative analysis of the two theories in many aspects such as rhetoric devices, semantics and phonology on verbal humor in 2 Broke Girls, the research makes it clear that both of them have strong explanatory power for verbal humor. Third, the research also proves that the two theories have the close relationship on generation mechanism of verbal humor. At last, the study shows a new angle to enjoy the verbal humor in the film and television literary works from the perspective of pragmatics. In brief, the study offers the generation mechanism of verbal humor to make people understand and enjoy humor to create humor well.