An Analysis Of Verbal Humor In Modern Family Based On Functional Grammar

As China wins a higher position in the world,intercultural communication has become close and frequent,so that only a deeper understanding of the other side’s utterances can prevent us from misconceptions and conflicts.Humor,as a regular element in communication,plays a lubricant role in resolving embarrassments and making dialogues’ atmosphere more harmonious.Hence,a true digest of humorous discourses and the deep implication behind them is an indispensable part of cross-cultural communication.Currently,within the scope of linguistics,cognitive linguistics and pragmatics are mostly applied to analyze verbal humor,while the utilization of functional grammar(FG)has experienced an underdevelopment.Therefore,this research will explore verbal humor from the perspective of Halliday’s FG,with an aim to help people comprehend its generation and interpretation mechanisms,and learn to employ and appreciate humor as well.Combining both quantitative and qualitative analyses together to conduct a case study of humorous dialogues in Modern Family,which has won the Emmy Award for Outstanding Comedy Series many times,this thesis probes into verbal humor in this sitcom comprehensively from metafunctions,register theory(RT)and grammatical metaphor(GM)in Halliday’s FG.This study addresses the following three research questions:(1)How is verbal humor produced and understood by metafunctions and which subsystem of them owns the greatest potential to make people laugh by observing distributed data?(2)What factors in register can illustrate the realization of verbal humor?(3)What kinds of GM can reveal the generation and comprehension mechanisms of verbal humor?The research findings are as follows:(1)Metafunctions appear in humorous dialogues of Modern Family in a high frequency,clarifying the forming and understanding processes of verbal humor through diverse functional structures of each system.The textual function is the most frequently used one among three metafunctions,becoming a laughter-eliciting linguistic function with the highest potential.(2)The three variables:field,tenor and mode of RT can exert an effect on and give rise to verbal humor,among which these three elements possess a similar ability to yield humor,for there are negligible differences among data distributions of them.(3)GM also owns a remarkable laugh-making effect by virtue of ideational metaphor,interpersonal metaphor and textual metaphor,among which interpersonal metaphor appears more frequently than the other two.The above findings prove that one stratification of metafunctions:textual function that can assist people to master the essence of humorous dialogues.Likewise,both RT and GM are equipped with a mighty explanatory power for the laughter-causing mechanism.On the grounds of statistics obtained in the research,people can get inspirations while encountering humor and thus acquiring more effective means to understand,appreciate and create verbal humor.Besides,with the corpus source from Modern Family,this thesis is designed to aid readers and English learners to gain an insight into the features of sitcom texts,experience American culture and deepen their comprehension of verbal humor,thus benefiting their English learning.