Humor In American Situation Comedy Friends--from The Perspective Of Discourse Analysis

Most works on humor have been done from the physiological, psychological, sociological, linguistic aspects and relatively fewer have been worked on from the perspective of discourse analysis. This thesis investigates the linguistic nvchanisms of humor from the perspective of discourse analysis, and proceeds an analysis of humor in the famous American sitcom Friends on formal links, speech act, conversational principles and contextual dimensions of discourse.Firstly, the antihor conducts a lite(?)lure review on humor research, introducing three traditional theories of humor--the superior theory, the incongruity theory, and the release theory. An analytic model is built on account of the theories of discourse analysis, thus the humor in Friends is carried out mainly from three diseoursal dimensions: The theory of cohesion indicates that formal devices like reference, ellipsis and substitution,conjunction, parallelism are account for the generation of humor; The SAT and principles of conversation(?)(CP, PP) study socialact and interactional.aspects of discourse. the context of discourse, including situational context and cultural context also play an important part in the generation of humor. The script of Friends is chosen as a linguistic corpus. The pieces of the scripts are classified and analyzed in accordance with the discoursal model established.Jn conclusion, discourse analysis has an interpretative power for the production and perception of humor, the research on diseoursal aspects of humor will hopefully give new insights into the interpretation of humor mechanisms.