Context Of Situation And Its Interpretation Of Humor In Friends

It has often been noted that the term "context of situation" is first coined by the anthropologist Branislow Malinowski in1923. He considers language meaning relies on the context to a very large extent. Firth’s representative personage of the London School develops Malinowski’s context theory; he states it in detail from the following three aspects:1) the relevant features of the participants;2) the relevant objects;3) the effect of the verbal action. Then his student Halliday further perfects the context theory. Halliday summarizes the context theory into three aspects, which are the field of discourse, the tenor of discourse and the mode of discourse. This paper focuses on the context of situation, specifically, the following three points:1) the field of discourse, namely what is going on actually and the social activity that relates to the text.2) The tenor of discourse, namely who are the participants and what the relationship among participants is.3) The mode of discourse, namely the media or channel of communication.This paper, taking the American sitcom Friends as an example and using the situational context theory as theoretical basis, tries to analyze the special function of context in the understanding of humorous utterance in situation comedy. As we all know, the purpose of situation comedy is for making laugh, the screenwriter’s success depends on if the audiences choose the right context to understand the humorous dialogue and then laugh. So if the audiences know the deep structure of the English humor they will invoke the correct situational context to understand the laughing point. And then this paper further analyzes the humorous corpus in Friends from the violations of the three variables of the situational context. These three violations refer to violate the field of discourse, the tenor of discourse and the mode of discourse. Any change of these three variables in the text will lead to the incoherence of the textual meaning, which may create humor to some extent. The emergence of humor is inseparable from the internal discipline of language and also largely depends on the using status of language in context. The author further verifies that violating the three variables of the situational context will create the humorous utterance after analyzing the samples in Friends.