Humorous Dialogue Of The "friends" Pragmatic Analysis

Nowadays, all kinds of sciences and knowledges develop fast and closely relate to each other. Linguists for the study of pragmatics also break though the limit of the theory itself. They use it widely in language teaching, translation, cross-cultural communication and interpersonal communication, etc. Among them, many scholars apply the theory of pragmatics to analysing humour phenomena, especially the humorous speech, providing a new perspective and vision for us to understand the humour , and achieving very good results.In this paper, we are going to apply the pragmatics such as presupposition, speech acts theory, cooperative principle, face-saving strategies, politeness, relevance theory and the three laws of pragmatics theory to analysing the humour dialogues in the TV play "Friends". And we will mainly use the methods of analysis, synthesis, induction and comparison methods as well as qualitative analysis.Through the analysis we can find that, in the process of communication, premising on the law of force constancy, restricted and promoted by the law of autonomy and economy, humour can be resulted in the following conditions: the presupposition misplaying of one side or both sides of the communication, in violation of the cooperative principle in the quantity, quality, relation or manner rule, relevance theory, speech acts theory, face-saving strategies, politeness etc. Therefore, every pragmatic theory has its own explaining angle and guiding function. We should use a variety of theories to research and understand the verbal humour from different perspectives and in all aspects at one time. Besides, through the combination of the corpus analysis, we can have deeper and more comprehensive understanding of the verbal humour and the cooperative as well as conflicting relationship between different pragmatic theories when analysing the same paragraph of verbal humour.