A Pragmatic Analysis Of Verbal Humor In American Sitcom Friends

Situation comedy whose life is verbal humor is a popular program. Among all the researches on verbal humor, few are done from a pragmatic point of view. The present thesis tries to fill this gap and analyzes verbal humor from the perspective of pragmatics.A qualitative research is conducted and the mechanism of verbal humor generation is analyzed under the theoretical framework of the three pragmatic theories:the cooperative principle, the politeness principle and the relevance theory. All of the twenty-seven humorous utterances applied in the present thesis are chosen from Friends, which is a popular sitcom worldwide. Almost all the language in Friends come from American life, funny, amusable and with high value.Through the analysis in the present thesis, it finds out that humorous effect could be achieved through violation of the cooperative principle in the maxim of Quantity, Quality, Relation and Manner; by violation of the politeness principle in Tact Maxim, Generosity Maxim, Approbation Maxim, Modesty Maxim, Agreement Maxim and Sympathy Maxim; the gap between ostension and inference, the gap between the maximal relevance and the optimal relevance and the different cognitive context between the speaker and the listener. Neither of the cooperative principle, the politeness principle and the relevance theory alone could analyze all humorous utterances, namely, each of the three pragmatic theories could only analyze some humorous utterances but not all of the humorous utterances. Thus, the three pragmatic theories should work together to interpret how humorous effect is achieved and a method of an overall pragmatic strategy specified in the three pragmatic theories which are the cooperative principle, the politeness principle and the relevance theory is formed and the method could analyze all of the humorous utterances.A pragmatic analysis of the mechanism of verbal humor generation could have a profound and lasting effect in many ways:approaches to explain the mechanism of verbal humor generation are extended; not only could people improve their perception and appreciation of humorous utterances and create humorous utterances in daily life but also they could create more and more popular art forms to achieve humorous effect; and the analysis could have a long and lasting effect on philosophy, aesthetics, literature, anthology, psychology and so on.