A Contrastive Study Of Verbal Humor In Chinese And American Situation Comedies From The Perspective Of Adaptation Theory

Humor,as a kind of linguistic phenomenon,can be seen everywhere in our life.The word “humor” in Chinese was first coined through transliteration by Lin Yutang and it refers to interesting or funny language and behavior.Those lively,witty,and even funny utterances play important roles in the interaction,which cannot be ignored.Westerners are particularly good at verbal humor which is implicit,gentle,witty,or slightly ironic.Humor is not only a tool for people's entertainment in communication,but also arouses people's deep thinking.Therefore,there is a close relationship between humor and language use.Verschueren believes that,as a kind of social behavior,language use is closely related to cognitive,social and cultural factors in daily life.Therefore,pragmatics should take a comprehensive view from cognitive,social and cultural perspective in language use research.His Adaptation Theory just meets the need.This thesis is carried out from the perspective of Adaptation Theory and the author chooses Chinese sitcom Ipartment and American sitcom Friends as data for the research,contrasting and analyzing the humorous utterances through data collection,qualitative and quantitative methods.The author proposes three research questions in the thesis.Firstly,what are the similarities of humor generation in Chinese and American sitcoms? Secondly,what are the differences of humor generation in Chinese and American sitcoms? Thirdly,what are the deep reasons for the differences of humor generation in Chinese and American sitcoms? Through the contrastive study of humorous utterances in Chinese and American sitcoms,the findings are as follows: firstly,there are similarities in the humorous utterances generated by the speaker in Chinese and American sitcoms,namely,in the generation of humorous utterances,the speaker makes linguistic choices in phonological,lexical,syntactic,discourse and pragmatic strategy levels.The reason why the speaker makes this or that choice is to adapt to the relevant factors in communicative world such as mental world,social world and physical world.Secondly,there are also differences between Chinese and American humorous utterances,which are mainly manifested in topic,function,form,style,etc.of humor.Thirdly,the differences of humor generation in Chinese and American sitcoms are the result of the different societies and cultures between the two countries.The social differences are mainly embodied in the social system and cultural differences are reflected in the values and thinking mode.Based on the contrastive study of verbal humor in Chinese and American sitcoms,the author aims to summarize the similarities and differences of humorous utterances in Chinese and American sitcoms.With the understanding of these features,language learners can better comprehend and appreciate the humor.It is helpful for them to further explore the cognitive,social and cultural roots of the humorous utterances in the two languages,hence promote the language learning and cross-cultural communicative ability.