An Analysis Of The Referential Meanings Of Proper Nouns In How I Met Your Mother

American situation comedy (sitcom for short) is popular among the audience of ourcountry, and increasingly wins the attention in the field of English teaching and learning dueto the cultural information it bears and life style it presents. Besides, many scholars havepublished papers or books about American sitcoms, but most lay emphasis on the study offollowing aspects: the actor or actress’ performance in the field of performing arts, thediscourse analysis and speech acts in linguistics and cross-cultural communication in culturaldimension, while less on the specific words and phrases in it, such as proper nouns. This isalso the reason why the author chooses proper nouns as the objects of study.By collecting and sorting out the proper nouns appeared in American sitcom How I MetYour Mother, the author lists four categories and eleven sub-categories in the thesis and makesa qualitative analysis of these collected proper noun through two theories: the RelevanceTheory and the Mental Space Theory, which represent two aspects—pragmatic and cognitiveaspects, in behalf of understanding the referential meaning of the proper nouns under differentcontext conditions.There are three research questions proposed in this thesis. First, is it possible for thereferential meanings of proper nouns to change in contexts of communication? Second, howdoes the change happen, and what communicative intention does the speaker want to conveyby using the changed pragmatic meaning of proper nouns? Third, as a kind of words used incommunication, how does the changed pragmatic meanings of proper nouns generate andmake the hearer understand? And after an analysis of the collected data under the guidance ofthe relevant theories and concepts, the following results are achieved after the analysis ofthose collected data:1) People may not always comply with the uniqueness of proper nouns’ meaning in our common sense. The reference of a proper noun may change and differ from itsoriginal or universal reference in people’s mind under different contexts.2) As for the way ofproper nouns’ reference changing, the speakers tend to base on the relevant information of itsoriginal reference to change the proper noun’s original meaning and use it with the aim ofexpressing his or her own conversational intention.3) Considering that both the speaker andthe listener have the idea that the conversation should go on fluently in most cases, thespeaker will take the listener’s knowledge structure, living experience and other informationinto consideration while he or she uses the proper noun on account of the contextual situation.In spite of the limitations, the thesis has some value or significance to a certain extent. Itcan be helpful in translation of subtitles, understanding the effects generated by using specificwords, and having some knowledge of the cultural information behind the specific words inthe process of learning or analyzing a sitcom or a drama.