The Contrastive Analysis Of Humor In Sitcom Friends And The Big Bang Grammatical Metaphor

The thesis is a new exploration of the humorous lines in Friends and The BigBang Theory under the framework of grammatical metaphor. As is known to us all,grammatical metaphor theory is one of the most important theories insystemic-functional linguistics, in which the linguist Halliday, the pioneer of thistheory, classified grammatical metaphor into two types: ideational metaphor andinterpersonal metaphor. Later on, based on three kinds of meta-function of languageideational function, interpersonal function and textual function, the linguist Martin putforward the concept textual metaphor and gives it a thorough description.It is universally acknowledged that every theory needs to be applied to thepractice. Since grammatical metaphor theory has been developed and improved by somany scholars and researchers both at home and abroad, it does evolve to become acomparatively mature theory. Thus the author tries to apply this theory to theparticular texts, namely, sit-com lines so as to find out the differences and similaritiesbetween the two sitcoms Friends and The Big Bang Theory and then reveals thefeelings and emotions of the audience after enjoying the two sitcoms. For example, itis unusually difficult to acquire a complete understanding for the audience becausetoo many scientific lines exist in The Big Bang Theory in which excessive use ofnominalization under Halliday’s ideational metaphor leads to larger informationthickness. As a result, the audience may get confused or puzzled even though they stillcan laugh. Comparatively speaking, ideational metaphor lying in Friends is not thatmuch. However, interpersonal metaphor is rather abundant so as to indicate thedifferent views of the different speakers.The innovative point of the thesis lies in that either Friends or The Big Bang wasstudied from the perspective of movie art theory, cross cultural communication,translation theory, cohesion, and pragmatic theory in the previous researches, theauthor attempts to analyze these two special texts from the perspective of grammaticalmetaphor, then come to his own conclusions.The thesis is divided into five parts: First chapter is the introduction. It isinvolved with background information, significance, framework, research method anddata collection. Second chapter is the literature review. It will focus on the review ofthe theoretical foundation: grammatical metaphor as well as the previous studies onFriends and The Big Bang Theory and a brief introduction to humor. Chapter three isthe framework part. It will systematically explain the grammatical metaphor whichincludes Halliday’s theory and other scholar’s views on it. At the same time, we willhave the classification and realization of grammatical metaphor together with fourfunctions of grammatical metaphor so that they can provide a strong support for thethesis. The fourth chapter is the body part. Enough textual data collected from Friendsand The Big Bang Theory will act as sample courses and the similarities anddifferences of the sample discourses in grammatical metaphor resulting fromtransference across different processes, grammatical metaphor resulting fromtransference within one process, grammatical metaphor realized by nominalization,verbalization and adjectivization, metaphors of modality and metaphors of mood as well as textual metaphors are explored in this chapter. Chapter five is the conclusionpart which will summarize the advantages and disadvantages of the research andpractical application will be discussed thus advise for related studies will be putforward for improvement.