A Pragmatic Analysis Of Conversational Humor In Growing Pains (Season One)

Conversational humor refers to humorous effect produced from daily humorous conversations. As part of language humor, conversational humor has always been paid much attention to by linguists as well as language researchers, who have been doing research into the generation of conversational humor from perspectives of psychology, aesthetics, linguistics, sociology, etc. With the rapid development of pragmatics, which mainly studies"speaker meaning"or"contextual meaning"or intended meaning, that is,"how more gets communicated than is said"(Yule, 2000:3), more and more language researchers are focusing their attention on the generation of humor from a pragmatic perspective. Many such papers dealing with the generation of conversational humor utilize the existing theories of pragmatics such as Grice's Cooperative Principle (CP) and its maxims, Leech's Politeness Principle (PP) and its maxims, Austin's Speech Act Theory (SAT) and some pragmatic concepts like Deixis, Presupposition, etc.Learning to fully understand and enjoy English conversational humor and to interpret the generation of English conversational humor is essential to English learning,as the ability to interpret and enjoy conversational humor is considered to be an important part in composing language learners'Pragmatic Competence (Bachman, 1990). American situational comedy has been an extremely useful source of English conversational humor ever since its appearance in the 1980s, and it has definitely benefited English learners and teachers by cultivating their interest and ability to enjoy conversational humor and its generation, enhancing their pragmatic competence in using English, as well as providing them with abundant background knowledge.Growing Pains, as a family sitcom, involves the lives and situations of a family, usually taking place inside their house or residence. It has 22 episodes in its first season. Each episode lasts around 23 minutes and is filled with amusing conversations between its characters, which is a typical feature of sitcom. Its humorous effect mainly depends on the daily humorous conversations between its characters. By employing pragmatic theories and concepts as its framework,the thesis here is trying to dig into the generation of conversational humor in Growing Pains (Season One) and classify its conversational humor into five categories according to its generation, that is,1. Deixis generated conversational humor: conversational humor generated by the misuse of person deixis, place deixis, time deixis and social deixis;2. Presupposition generated conversational humor: conversational humor generated by contrast of different presuppositions between the speaker and the listener; 3. CP-Violation generated conversational humor: conversational humor generated by purposely violating the CP and its maxims;4. PP-Abidance or PP-Violation generated conversational humor: conversational humor generated by purposely abiding by or violating the PP and its maxims;5. SAT generated conversational humor: conversational humor generated by misunderstanding the speaker's intentional speech act.It is hoped that the thesis can help provide learners and teachers of English with a relatively comprehensive pragmatic method on the generation of conversational humor in sitcoms. Hopefully, too, that this thesis might make some contributions to both teaching and learning English through English films and TV plays.