An Analysis Of Stylistic Features And Pragmatic Strategies In Sitcom Dialogues

Sitcom with its unique glamour conquers different people of diverse classes and ages:men and women, old and young. It not only gains the audience's appreciation, but also gets the attentions of many scholars. Some scholars have studied the humorous expressions and functions of the sitcom from the Journalism, Foreign Language Teaching, Literary Translation and so on. But most of their studies are about the theory research, only a few researchers connected the theory with practice, which shows that the present study of sitcom is inadequate. Common study of sitcom is to use one or two theories to explain the causes and effects of its verbal humor. It is rare to see the research that study sitcom as a whole and analyze its pragmatic features, not limited to the single category of humor. There are few studies on the impact of sitcom on people's daily communication, in other words, the study of the practical significance of the sitcom is still limited.As one of the most popular American sitcoms in recent years, The Big Bang Theory (TBBT) is representative of the genre, sitcom. Corpus studied in this thesis mostly comes from the dialogues in this 24-episode American sitcom TBBT (season 8). The main purposes to analyze the stylistic features and pragmatic strategies of the sitcom dialogues are as follows:First, analyze the stylistic features of the sitcom dialogues from the four basic aspects of stylistics. Comprehensive analysis of the stylistic features, rather than a particular level.Second, analyze the application of Cooperative Principles (CP) and Pragmatic Presupposition Theory (PP) in the sitcom TBBT, and then summarize the pragmatic strategies appear in the sitcom dialogues.Third, find out what effects does the pragmatic strategies in sitcom dialogues have on people's daily communication.This thesis consists of six chapters. The first chapter is a brief introduction to the research, including the background research, the purpose, the significance of the research, the research methodology, the corpus collection and the structure of the thesis. The second chapter provides the literature review of the thesis, including the research status and latest progress of stylistics and sitcom. The third chapter, also the theoretical framework, is mainly about the relevant theories involved in the research on the analysis of linguistic features and pragmatic strategies of the sitcom dialogues. Chapter four and five are the main parts of the thesis. Based on the theoretical framework of this thesis, the fourth chapter is about the detailed analysis of the dialogues in TBBT, and the summary of its stylistic features. The fifth chapter is based on CP and PP. This chapter is about the pragmatic analysis of the dialogues in TBBT, then summarizes the pragmatic strategies in the sitcom, and finds out what effects does the sitcom have on people's daily conversation. Chapter six summarizes the major findings and limitations of the research, the development prospect and suggestions for the further studies.Through the analysis and research, the major findings of this thesis are summarized as follows:Firstly, in order to be more precise, stylistic features need to be analyzed from the basic levels, such as phonetic level, lexical level, syntactic level and rhetoric devices. This can improve the feasibility of stylistics in analyzing the stylistic features of the sitcom dialogues.Secondly, from the aspect of expression, compared with real-life communication, sitcom dialogues pay more attention to comic effects, for sitcom's own essential characteristic comicality. The humorous effects in TBBT dialogues are achieved by using different tones, mimicking and many rhetorical devices like personification, metaphor, pun, climax and anti-climax, etc. Violating maxims of CP and applying pragmatic presupposition can also reach the humorous intention.Thirdly, a lot of principles and theories are used in sitcom dialogues to carry out the pragmatic strategies. Both obedience and violation of CP contain conversational implicature. Obedience of CP helps conversation go on smoothly and violation of CP may aim to achieve some specific purposes.Fourthly, presupposition is very important in people's communication, which could make the conversation more efficient. Proper use of presupposition could help the speakers to accomplish the specific communication aims. If the pragmatic strategies used in sitcom dialogues could be properly applied in real-life communication, they could help people achieve their communication aims more smoothly, effectively and humorously.To state briefly, through the analysis of the dialogues in TBBT (season 8), the author finds out its stylistic features, and proves that stylistics and pragmatics are feasible and effective in analyzing the sitcom dialogues. Also the author proves the feasibility and effectiveness of stylistic analysis as a way to analyze the sitcom dialogues and enrich the study of the sitcom in China. To a certain extent, the author expects that the results of the research could make it clear that how sitcom affect people's daily communication and improve their communicative skills and the ability to appreciate the sitcom. In addition, the author hopes that this study could help script writers to create more influential and classical sitcoms.