A Study Of Verbal Humor In How I Met Your Mother From The Perspective Of Cooperative Principle

Humor is not only a kind of human wisdom, but also a kind of attitude towards life.. Humor has been one of the hottest research subjects for a long period of time, which has been widely discussed in various fields such as philosophy, sociology, psychology, anthropology and so on. With the development of linguistics, the study on humor from the perspective of pragmatics is drawing more and more attention. People began to ponder over this common but special language phenomenon.With the universality of television, situation comedy has developed into an emerging and popular form of entertainment. As one of the carriers of humor, situation comedy enjoys worldwide popularity. It displays humor in daily life in an exaggerate and hilarious way. Household life as the theme and humorous language contribute to the popularity of situation comedy. One of the most favored American situation comedies is How I Met Your Mother. Therefore this thesis explores the generation of humor through the analysis of plenty of examples in How I Met Your Mother on the theoretical basis of cooperative principle. In order to display the up-to-date character of verbal humor, the corpus for study originates from the verbal humor in the ninth episode of this situation comedy. In this episode, examples of verbal humor are typical and the types of the generation of verbal humor are abundant, which is convenient for collection and analysis. This thesis puts an emphasis on the qualitative study on the generation of humor.Cooperative principle, the most basic and fundamental theory in linguistics, usually serves as one of the most important theoretical bases of linguistic study on humor. This thesis makes a thorough study on the verbal humor generated by violating certain maxims of cooperative principle in the American situation comedy How I Met Your Mother on the theoretical basis of cooperative principle for the purpose of elaborating the relationship between cooperative principle and verbal humor as well as the generation of verbal humor.This thesis consists of three parts: introduction, body and conclusion.The first part is the introduction to the thesis. The author gives an introduction to the study background, which contains cooperative principle, situation comedy and verbal humor. The author gives an detailed description of the study on verbal humor at home and abroad. The reason why the author carries out this study and the research methodology applied are also presented in this part.The second part is the main body of the thesis, which includes five chapters.Chapter One is literature review. As the theoretical basis of the thesis, cooperative principle is elaborated thoroughly from the perspective of definition, violation, limitation etc. The author introduces the definition, development and classification of situation comedy in detail. In order to help readers get a good understanding of the examples illustrated in the study, the characters and story line of How I Met Your Mother are also introduced in this part. Finally, the author fully illustrates verbal humor from the aspect of definition and major theories.Chapter Two is the analysis of the verbal humor in How I Met Your Mother generated by the violation of the maxim of quantity on the basis of cooperative principle. According to quantity maxim, the speaker should provide a right amount of information. In other words, the speaker should provide neither more nor less information than required. This chapter is further divided into two parts. This first part introduces three forms of providing less information: aposiopesis, rhetorical question and allusion and analyzes thoroughly the verbal humor generated in these forms. The second part analyzes the verbal humor generated by providing more information in detail.Chapter Three is the analysis of the verbal humor in How I Met Your Mother generated by the violation of the maxim of quality on the basis of cooperative principle. According to quality maxim, the speaker should provide true information. In other words, the speaker should provide neither false nor unreliable information. This chapter is further divided into four parts. The first part analyzes thoroughly the verbal humor generated by providing exaggerated information due to the application of hyperbole. The second part analyzes thoroughly the verbal humor generated by providing understated information due to the application of understatement. The third part analyzes thoroughly the verbal humor generated by providing untrue information due to the application of metaphor. The fourth part analyzes thoroughly the verbal humor generated by providing information contrary to the reality due to the application of irony.Chapter Four is the analysis of the verbal humor in How I Met Your Mother generated by the violation of the maxim of relation on the basis of cooperative principle. According to relation maxim, the speaker should provide information relevant to the ongoing conversation. This chapter is further divided into two parts. The first part analyzes the verbal humor created by speaker’s unconscious violation of relation maxim due to a misunderstanding of the conversation. The second part analyzes verbal humor created by speaker’s conscious violation of the maxim of relation. A detailed elaboration of the verbal humor created by the application of euphemism is also presented.Chapter Five is the analysis of the verbal humor in How I Met Your Mother generated by the violation of the maxim of manner on the basis of cooperative principle. According to manner maxim, the speaker should pay attention to the way of speaking. This chapter is further divided into five parts. The first part analyzes thoroughly the verbal humor generated by providing repeated information due to the application of repetition. The second part analyzes thoroughly the verbal humor generated by providing self-contradictory information due to the application of paradox. The third part analyzes thoroughly the verbal humor generated by providing more than one piece of information due to the application of pun. The fourth part analyzes thoroughly the verbal humor generated by the application of parody. The fifth part analyzes thoroughly the verbal humor generated by providing referential information due to the application of synecdoche.The third part is the conclusion. The author makes a summary of the findings of this thesis, which has presented a brand-new angle for the study on the understanding of cooperative principle and the analysis of verbal humor. The findings also play an important role in promoting daily communication, English learning and cross-cultural communication. In the end, the author summarizes the limitations of the study and provides suggestions for future study.