A Study On The Verbal Humor In The Big Bang Theory From The Perspective Of Register

Humor is very common in daily life and it is like a condiment in people’s life.Itmakes people laugh and makes life interesting.The forms of humor are various,such as short sketches,cross talks,jokes,films and situation comedies,among which situationcomedies are very popular.The American sitcom the Big Bang Theoryhave attractedmillions of audience around the world due to its special character design.Situations are presented to the audience in humorous and funny verbal communications,and actors’ lines become an indispensable factor in humor creation.Humor is also thought to be unique to the human being,and it has become an important topic in academic studies.Sinceancient times,many scholars have analyzedand elaborated the formation,characteristics,and classification of humor from different perspectives.Functional linguistics is a branch of linguistics,and register theory,deriving its origin from context theory,is an important theory in functional linguistics and includes field,tenor and mode.Field can be further subdivided into topic,activity and environment;the sub-factors of tenor include contact,emotion and power;and mode can be sub-categorized into feedback and medium.In this thesis,two questions are answered: what are the types of verbal humor in the sitcom? How can the different types of verbal humor be interpreted from the perspective of register?The research data come from eight seasons of the sitcom.There are 183 episodes in total and a dialogue is chosen from an episode according to the loudness of the audience’s laughterin virtue of the software Pocket RTA.After this quantitative analysis,the 183 dialogues are classified into three types based on Spanakaki’s theory on humor categorization: language-specific humor,universal humor and culture-specific humor.The results show that the number of language-specific humor is 87,the number of universal humor is 88,while the number of culture-specific humor is only 8.Language-specific humor is often realized in virtue of semantic means and rhetorical devices.In this thesis the emphasis is put on the rhetorical devices and the frequently applied rhetorical devices in the sitcom mainly include sarcasm,pun,irony,hyperbole and comparison.On this basis,different types of humor are interpreted from the perspective of register combined with concrete datum.It turns out that almost all dimensions have affected the production of humor.In terms of universal humor,the most representative one is topic,such as topic shifting and digression,and contradiction.The second representative dimension affecting humor creation is activity in universal humor.Emotions and contact are the major factors influencing the humor production in terms of linguistic humor in the sitcom,and the variations of contact frequency and contact range are the common ways.The change of emotions can result in the change of language use and activities,which is also a way to produce humor in this sitcom.The number of culture humor is much less than the other two types.In the two examples given in this thesis,power and emotion are the two factors affecting humor production.In this thesis,the verbal humor in the Big Bang Theory is interpreted from the perspective of register,which is a tentative study in the field of functionallinguistics,providing a new perspective for humor interpretation and appreciation.