| Humor reflects the speaker's wisdom and attitudes to life and brings us great pleasure. It is an important part of all languages and cultures. It is also an essential part of English language study to fully understand and appreciate the English verbal humor.Studies on humor have drawn attention from philosophy, psychology, literature, sociology, linguistics and anthropology. For a long time, many linguists study verbal humor only from the semantic and rhetorical perspectives. Since the 1980s, with the development of pragmatics, more and more verbal humor studies focus on the pragmatic perspective. Situation Comedy (shortened as sitcom) is one of the most popular programs in which verbal humor plays an important role. Sitcoms provide plenty of verbal humor materials for pragmatic study. As one of the most popular American sitcoms, The Big Bang Theory has a distinct language feature for the verbal humor research.From the perspective of pragmatics, this research intends to employ two pragmatic theories, namely the Cooperative Principle (Shortened as CP) and the Relevance Theory (shortened as RT) to analyze the inner generation mechanism of verbal humor in the sitcom The Big Bang Theory. The analysis shows that humor can be achieved by deliberately flouting the maxims of the Cooperative Principle, or creating the gap between the maximal relevance and the optimal relevance of Relevance Theory. Furthermore, this thesis also compares these two pragmatic theories on their different interpretations of the generation mechanism of verbal humor. The CP and the RT differ from each other in their theoretical sources, inferential models, theoretical models and different interpretations of some figures of speech. Moreover, both theories have their limitations on explaining certain kind of verbal humor. Thus, it is an effective way to combine these theories on interpreting the verbal humors.This thesis does the research mainly with qualitative analysis. The data resources are from 30 episodes which are randomly selected from the sitcom The Big Bang Theory. Based on the analysis, the generation mechanism of humor has been tentatively explored. The corresponding theoretical hypothesis is further verified and developed by applying the pragmatic approach to the explanation of the generation mechanisms of verbal humor in the specific context--sitcom. The findings of this study provide some useful suggestions for people to understand and appreciate verbal humor. |
