Study On The Production Mechanism Of Humor In The Sitcom The Big Bang Theory From The Perspective Of Pragmatic Presupposition

As a special language phenomenon, humor is pervasive in literature, film andtelevision, advertising and daily communication. It amuses people, gives people asense of ease and fun, warms up atmosphere, eases contradiction, regulates socialrelationship and manifests human thought and wisdom. For this reason, humorphenomenon has attracted much attention of scholars in various fields. Domestic andforeign scholars have studied humor from the perspectives of psychology, philosophy,sociology, rhetoric, anthropology, etc. In the1980s, domestic and foreign scholarsstarted their researches of humor from the linguistic perspective. With the progress ofpragmatics, the foreign scholars Sperber&Wilson attempted to study humor from theperspective of pragmatics in1981. In1988, the Chinese scholar Lv Guangdan beganto apply pragmatic theories into the study of humor. Since then, more and moredomestic scholars started to apply pragmatic theories to study humor phenomenon.However, most of them use Conversational Implicature Theory, Speech Act Theoryand Relevance Theory to explain humor phenomenon. The researches of humor fromthe perspective of pragmatic presupposition are insufficient. As one of the carriers ofhumor, sitcom provides a rich corpus for the pragmatic study of humor. The Big BangTheory, one of the most popular American sitcoms in the broadcast, reflects the life ofscientific genius. With its special language characteristics of humor and wittiness, thesitcom The Big Bang Theory has been deeply loved by the audience all over theworld.From the perspective of pragmatics, this thesis uses pragmatic presuppositiontheory to analyze the humor in the sitcom The Big Bang Theory and to find theproduction mechanism of humor in it, so as to know how its humorous effects areachieved. Through adopting the corpus analysis method and the inductive analysismethod, this thesis uses pragmatic presupposition theory and the incongruity theory,one of the most influential humor theories, to analyze the humor in The Big BangTheory. Through careful analysis of plenty of humorous cases selected from The BigBang Theory, this thesis finds that the sitcom The Big Bang Theory uses fourproperties of pragmatic presupposition to produce humor, i.e. violating the mutual knowledge, cancelling the appropriateness, using the defeasibility and using theadditivity to produce incongruity in the conversation. Thereupon humor generates.This thesis holds that the violation of the mutual knowledge of presupposition can bedivided into two cases: lack of mutual knowledge and intentional cancellation ofmutual knowledge. The thesis also finds that the appropriateness of presupposition iscancelled intentionally or accidentally, and points out the specific linguistic factorsand non-linguistic factors resulting in the cancellation of presupposition. Linguisticfactors include intra-sentential context, discourse context and construction of reduetioarguments. Non-linguistic factors include common knowledge, backgroundknowledge and body language.Following conclusions are achieved in the thesis:(1) The existence of pragmaticpresupposition is a significant way to cause humor in the sitcom The Big BangTheory;(2) Through using pragmatic presupposition, the sitcom The Big Bang Theorysucceeds in producing humorous and witty effects of comedy, which is full ofsarcasm, banter and ridicule.