A Research On The Humor Of Situation Comedies In Light Of Register Theory

In recent years,certain foreign situation comedies are introduced to China through the Internet,which have made a great impact on China.Friends,The Big Bang Theory,2 Broke Girls are all the classic situation comedies.Most of these TV series embody the typical American humor,thus enhancing the artistic charm of the situation comedies.Through the joy,people know about many other countries,such as new way of living and different social customs.Humor is the essence of comedy and exists in every corner of our lives.It brings us the joy and it is an art in the process of language use.As the shaping of the humor directly determines the quality of a situation comedy,so the research on humor is quite necessary.Scholars from abroad or at home have done a lot of researches on humor from different fields.However,most of the researches are from the perspective of cognitive linguistics and pragmatics,and few are discussed from the functional linguistics.Apparently,there is much more weakness in the researching of sitcom humor.Based on the present situation,the thesis is aimed at making comprehensive discussions of sitcom humor from the new perspective of functional linguistics.Functionalists such as Malinowski,Firth,and Halliday have established complete and theoretical systems,which possess distinctive language symbols and unique research methods.The thesis is intended to take the register theory as a guiding framework,selecting Friends,a famous situation comedy,as a case study.As is known to all,language is meaningless without context.Context is an important basis for comprehension and expression.Register is derived from the context.It is synonymous with context(Martin,1992).So the theory is bound to play a powerful role to the interpretation of humor.Based on register theory,this thesis tries to make a fresh attempt to the generative mechanism of humor in situation comedies,expecting to find the inner and the corresponding links between humor and register.The author believes that analysis of humor in sitcoms using the register theory is of great significance and guidance to the comprehension of humor for the majority of English learners in China.At the same time situation comedies as teaching materials can be applied to English class.The register theory has strong explanatory power for understanding humor and humor mechanisms.It deserves the further study.The author hopes this thesis can play a valuable role and use the little to get the big.The paper consists of five parts.The first part is the introduction,which presents the background,purpose,meaning,method and the basic framework of the thesis.The second part is the literature review.In this part,the author traces the historical development of situation comedies and humor at first,then reviews some studies of humor in situation comedies from different fields from scholars both at home and abroad.The third part is the theoretical support and basis of the thesis,which presents the development,definitions and three variables of the register in order to understand the guiding significance of register theory to humor.The fourth part is the main body of the paper,which is the application part of the register theory in Friends.The author conducts the deep analysis of humor following the idea of register,interpreting and analyzing the various humors in Friends from three variables of register respectively: the field of discourse,the tenor of discourse,the mode of discourse.The fifth part is the last part of this thesis,summarizing the research results and pointing out current limitations and future directions of the study.