Verbal Humor Conveyed By Violating The Cooperative Principle In Conversations: A Case Study Of American Sitcom "The Big Bang Theory"

Humor as an immemorial research issue, the earliest study can be traced back to era of Plato and Aristotle in Ancient Greece, since then scholars from different disciplines such as philosophy, literature, linguistics, sociology, anthropology, and aesthetics make great efforts on humor study. Lots of scholars study humor from psychology and form three typical conventional theories of humor which are called Superiority Theory, Incongruity Theory and Relief Theory. Study on humor has made much progress and from different angles over the centuries. Linguistically, studies such as semantics, syntax, stylistics and pragmatics provide widely and newly angle for humor research. The Semantic Script Theory of Humor (SSTH) and the General Theory of Verbal Humor (GTVH) are two theories from semantic angle, interaction between language and cognition is discussed. Research on humor from the perspective of pragmatics such as presupposition, cooperative principle, speech act theory and so on are also being studied by linguists.Verbal humor as the main form of humor is commonly seen in daily life. It is the essence of human language. Using verbal humor in a conversation makes people laugh, in the meantime, inspires people's thinking and exchanges of feeling. What's more, it helps people get closer to each other. In this thesis, the author aims to study verbal humor, one theory of pragmatics is chose as the theoretical framework, cooperative principle which has profound influence on the following theories in pragmatics and has become the central topic of pragmatics research, although many scholars propose objection to it, cooperative principle is still useful in interpreting conversation. On the basis of the theory of CP, the following scholars study conversation in different ways. Grice's Cooperative Principle (CP) makes it clear that how it is possible for the speaker to deliver more than what is literally said and for the hearer to comprehend, it is a significant contribution to the study of pragmatics. For the speaker and hearer, they have to cooperate, propose the real, adequate, brief and relevant conversation. According to Grice, there are four maxims of the cooperative principle:Quantity Maxim, Quality Maxim, Relation Maxim and Manner Maxim, it explains how it is possible to mean more than what is actually expressed, and also plays an essential role in the generation of conversational implicatures. Definition of the four maxims are given in the thesis, also detailed analysis of the violation of each maxim are presented. However, the speaker often violates some of the maxims to achieve exaggerated, ironic, and funny effect in humorous conversation.The corpus in the thesis is based on situation comedy, the reason for choosing situation comedy as a research object is as follows. Situation Comedy first generated in American radio in 20 century 20's, now mainly on television which becomes a popular type of TV program, and a main aspect for entertainment around the world. Situation comedy likes an encyclopedia which can reflect culture, livelihood, and customs of a country. It includes verbal humor and situational humor, humor contains in the sitcom by its verbal language, action and expression of the main characters, etc. Watching a situation comedy in spare time is a good choice for which can give the audience relax atmosphere. Most of the sitcoms display everyday life of common people and reflect problems in all aspects of real life in America. What's more, study on situation comedy is valuable, analysis of the humorous language in it supports foreign language learners a better way to master the language and know more about the different culture.The latest American sitcom "The Big Bang Theory" is selected as the corpus in the thesis, it is considered as the most popular sitcom since it was broadcast on Columbia Broadcasting System in America, it takes credit for its ubiquitous humor. It centers on daily life of four geniuses and a waitress. After the survey of the author, because of its novelty, former study of this sitcom confines to the perspective of syntactic analysis and irony. The aim of this thesis is to analyze dialogues of the situation comedy by theory of cooperative principle and its related maxims, to find out how verbal humor is interpreted in CP and by violation of it. Audience who enjoy the sitcom can have a further understanding of the language use in the sitcom, language learners who watch other similar comedies can have a deeper comprehension of the humor in sitcoms. What's more, it can also let the audience learn some communication skills, improve their ability of verbal communication in daily life and also the popularity of it draws many researchers to study from various perspectives.Two questions have risen in the thesis. Question one:How is verbal humor generated through the violation of CP and its four maxims? Question two:What is the implication in English teaching from the analysis of the sitcom in CP?The standard of the selection of the corpus is that, there are four seasons in the famous and popular sitcom, for which the fourth season is still updating, in order to use the newest and complete, full scale data, the author chooses the third season as the study corpus.20 episodes are selected randomly with the script which is downloaded from the Internet. For the sake of certainty of humorous effect in the chosen examples, the author also watched the related video tapes. When the verbal humor is collected, the background audience's laughter is taken into consideration as a standard. Wherever there is background laughter, there exists humor in the sitcom. Qualitative analysis and quantitative analysis of the data are used as the major research methods from the approach of cooperative principle in order to achieve maximal reliability and minimize subjectivity of the author.The author makes a statistics, aims to collect the whole number of verbal humor in the corpus, and count the percentage from the perspective of CP, and also count the number of violation of each maxim. A detailed analysis of the data is given to examine which maxims are violated. The author also presents some typical examples, analyzing by violation of each maxim.After the careful data collection and statistic analysis, the author gets the following findings:Firstly, there are close relationship between verbal humor and CP, most of the verbal humor in the sitcom achieved the humorous effect by violating the maxims of the cooperative principle. Sometimes, the characters in the sitcoms violate the maxims purposely in order to make fun of others in their dialogues or just want to be witty and humorous. Sometimes they violate it unintentionally, others consider it as humor. What's more, the author also gives a detailed analysis of violation of the four maxims, after the calculation of the number, the maxim of quantity is more often violated to cause humorous effect in the sitcom and the least is manner maxim. Furthermore, the characters in the sitcom sometimes violate several of the maxims at the meantime purposely or unintentionally. Violation of the cooperative principle is one of the reasons for its verbal humor and popularity among audience.The present study is of great significance. Humor as a language phenomenon plays an important role in culture. Verbal humor can improve the interrelationship when communicate with people. Furthermore, the author proceeds to discuss the good effect through applying verbal humor in English teaching classroom. It is meaningful to analyze verbal humor in sitcom using cooperative principle. It can help the English learners to comprehend and appreciate the humor of the sitcom better, and make the best of sitcom when learn foreign language.Using sitcom as a teaching supplement material in class can help the students learn English in an active way. It improves the students'skills of listening and speaking when they enjoy the sitcom. The students are required to remember and imitate the vocabulary and sentence pattern, what's more, they can image themselves as one of the characters in the sitcom, role-play it in class. The daily expression and new words help students enlarge the vocabulary. It is also one way for the non-English majors to know more about the western culture. According to English learners, it is a bottleneck to understand and appreciate the English humor when study a foreign language. In English class, teacher can introduce knowledge of pragmatics, such as conversation implicature to explain some language obstacles, guide the students to understand the deep meaning of the language material through the knowledge of pragmatics, it can improve learning interest of students, increase their background knowledge, promote language learning. In the process of English learning, the sense of English humor will be cultivated day by day.