"friends" In The Sense Of Humor, Then Turn Explore

Turn-taking is a very common phenomenon in daily conversations, while humor in the language is increasingly becoming an indispensable part in the human communication. However, research on humor from the pragmatic perspective, with the mechanism of turn-taking has not been widely examined. In the thesis, the cognition of Sperber and Wilson's Relevance Theory is academically conducted as to its explanation of how verbal humor is produced and interpreted. Then, with remarkable and vivid illustrations in American sitcom Friends, the thesis aims at expounding and summarizing the turn-taking features in it from the aspects of both speaker and hearer.There are three chapters in the thesis:chapter one interprets the concepts of turn-taking and pragmatic humor; chapter two introducing the procedure of appreciating humors by applying both turn-taking mechanism and relevance theory. Methodologically speaking, chapter three integrates both the qualitative and the quantitative research methods to support humorous interpretation processes and summarize a set of turn-taking rules which fit for humorous turns in Friends by illustrating a solid number of jokes from the first ten episodes of Friends. We would like to argue that, after relevance interpretation, verbal humor in sitcom especially in Friends has its unique rules and characteristics in terms of turn-taking.