The Generation And Translation Of The Verbal Humor In American Sitcom Growing Pains

Humor plays a very important role in practice. It can adjust social relationship, amuse one’s mood, enrich one’s life, exhibit one’s wisdom and so on. Although the Western research on humor goes back to the ancient times, most of the theories focus on sociology, psychology and cognitive psychology to find analysis on humor, which gives birth to the three primary and traditional branches of humor theories including the superiority/disparagement theory from the perspective of sociology, relief theory from the perspective of psychoanalysis and the incongruity theory from the perspective of cognitive psychology.Sitcom is a humorous drama based on the situation that might arise in everyday life. To make the audience laugh is one of the most essential ingredients and the ultimate goal of sitcoms. Nowadays sitcom has been established as a mature comic literary genre and part of the staple diet of mainstream television entertainment around the world. Among American sitcoms, Growing Pains is the most popular one, which is developed in a family setting with loving parents and lovely kids of different characters. Based on the previous research, the present study makes an exploration into the underlying mechanisms of the verbal humor presented in American sitcom Growing Pains, within the framework of two pragmatic theories, namely, Grice’s Cooperative Principle and Leech’s Politeness Principle. It is found, based on a qualitative analysis of a great sum of data, that a violation of CP and PP maxims can result in the generation of a lot of humor. Besides, this thesis also discusses the humorous utterances depending on the Speech Act Theory. Searle subdivides the illocutionary act into five categories:representatives, directives, commisives, expressives, and declarations. According to Searle’s subdivision, I analyze the humor caused by the Speech Act Theory in Growing Pains. What is discovered is that people can not only do things with words but also make fun with words.This thesis also aims at applying theories of pragmatics to interpreting how to achieve pragmatic equivalence in the translation of dialogues in Growing Pains. The author attempts to discuss how translators are able to interpret the intended force in the SL and reproduce it in the TL appropriately with the help of the principle of pragmatics, namely, cooperative principle and conversational implicature, in order to achieve pragmatic equivalence under the influence of linguistic factors, cultural factors in their translation.