An Adaptation-Relevance Approach To Verbal Humor In American Sitcoms

As a reflection of human wisdom and creativity, humor pervades nearly every aspect of human society, playing indispensable roles in our daily lives. Researches on humor can be traced back to the times of Plato and Aristotle. All through the years, it has always been a hot issue attracting scholars from various disciplines. Recently, more researchers have shifted their attention to the pragmatic study of humor, namely to analyze this phenomenon in its dynamic use under concrete contexts.Following this direction, the current research is conducted to analyze the production and interpretation mechanisms of verbal humor in the American sitcom Friends in the light of Adaptation-Relevance Model as well as to find out whether the suggested model holds the same adequate explanatory and descriptive power as it does over other genres of linguistic phenomena. American sitcom, as a special type of comedy performance, largely counts on verbal humor to create the general effect of the play. Among others, Friends might be one of the most successful and well-known drama series all over the world. The humorous and witty dialogues which can be easily found all through the play make it an ideal source of data for this research.Relevance Theory and Adaptation Theory, each possessing theoretical advantages and demerits of their own, are complementary to each other in many aspects. Based on the two theories, Adaptation-Relevance Model is proposed with the aim of constructing a unified model for the more comprehensive and rational account of any communicative event.Claims of the model can be reduced to the following dimensions along which analysis is conducted:First, communication is a relevance-oriented process. Second, it is the presumption of relevance that determines the communicators'choices of particular expressions.Third, adaptation-relevance in this model is a dynamic process of inter-adaptation between contextual correlates and linguistic choices.Fourth, the process of adaptation-relevance also entails strategy choosing. Based on the analysis of the selected data under the framework of Adaptation-Relevance Model, conclusions can thus be drawn that the use of verbal humor is a process of adaptation-relevance during which communicators'linguistic and contextual choices constantly inter-adapt with each other, with the ultimate goal of seeking for relevance. By absorbing the essence of Relevance Theory and Adaptation Theory, Adaptation-Relevance Model acquires much more forceful descriptive and explanatory power. It offers a fairly new perspective for the analysis of humor, covering both the production and interpretation processes of humorous communication.To some extent, this thesis promotes the systematic study on humor as a linguistic behavior from an angle few has ever touched upon before. As a relatively new framework, Adaptation-Relevance Model deserves more academic attention and is still in desperate need of further verification and revision. This tentative application of the model to the analysis of verbal humor in American sitcoms enriches the existing studies of Adaptation-Relevance Model and serves as a further proof of its general feasibility for the account of different linguistic phenomena.