A Study Of Verbal Humor In American Sitcom Two And A Half Men From The Perspective Of Cooperative Principle

Humor research may retrospect to the era of Plato and Aristotle in Ancient Greek as the first studying record.With the development of analysis,it offers a set of comprehensive description from different angles including anthropology,sociology,aesthetics,literature,philosophy,linguistics etc.Western scholars have studied humor on the basis of psychological perspective from three pivotal traditional theories Incongruity Theory,Superiority Theory and Relief Theory,which provide a great theoretical support to study psychological mechanism.With the development of linguistics,it provides larger space for humor research.Linguistic researchers study humor from three aspects The Semantic Script Theory of Humor(SSTH),The General Theory of Verbal Humor(GTVH)and Audience-based Theory of Verbal Humor.With time going by,more and more scholars devote to study verbal humor from the pragmatic angles,in which a wealth of theories can be used to analyze verbal humor phenomenon thoroughly.With enlightened by H.P.Grice's Cooperative Principle,this thesis will choose CP theory as the theoretical framework and take American Sitcom as script to reveal the causes of humor.There are two research questions in this thesis:Question1: How verbal humor is fulfilled by violating Cooperative Principle and its sub-maxims in situation comedy?Questioin2: What frequencies of maxims are used in the process of producing humor by violating Cooperative Principle and its sub-maxims?Cooperative Principle was firstly proposed by Grice,who started to contrive his thoughts of this theory in his fifties,but it was by William James lectures who announced at Harvard in 1967,and then it has been widely informed by the public.Cooperative Principle enlightens a new way for scholars to study pragmatic linguistics,and also offers fresh ideas for communication,then becomes an important issue of analysis.Grice mentions that there are closely relationship between the speakers and listeners according to the basic principles and rules,which intend to make sure successful and favorable verbal communications.What's more,he proposes that participants are also reciprocal cooperative in daily life conversations.They all spare no efforts to ensure a period of conversations carrying out smoothly,obeying a set of special stipulations in order to understand each other better.Grice puts forward that Cooperative Principle can be divided into several maxims and some sub-maxims such as “Quantity”,“Quality”,“Relation” and “Manner”.In ideal condition,people should obey these maxims to fulfill conversations.However,the Cooperative Principle and its sub-maxims are always violated,which could produce extra meanings what is called “conversational implicature”.Hence,this thesis applies classical pragmatic theory----Cooperative Principle into analysis as the theoretical framework to research verbal humor.Sitcom which is also called situation comedy is a kind of comedy performance form which first comes on the broadcast,and then moves to television.In many countries,situation comedy is one of the most popular TV programs.It's popular with the young and the old.People are keen on chasing sitcom not only for laughter,but they'd like to explore American's thinking patterns,meanwhile to understand foreign cultures.All the corpuses are excerpted from the famous American sitcom Two and a Half Men.When coming into audiences' eyes for the first time,it obtains high audience rating.For this reason,the study is an empirical analysis which according to the humorous texts of Two and a Half Men.This thesis uses the combination of qualitative research and quantitative research.Quantitative research is a kind of way to gather data and also calculates the percentage of the occupation of each maxim from the flouting of the CP.Qualitative analysis is also applied to gather corpus according to CP and its sub-maxims.The items are selected on the basis of each flout of maxims and then this thesis will set forth how humor effects are generated through each violation.Finally,this thesis elaborately chooses corpus research of representative examples utilizing Cooperative Principle.This thesis hopes to utilize this kind of way for audiences to have a further understanding toward humor.After a number of data collection and studying,this thesis comes to a conclusion: American sitcom exhibits visually explanation of verbal humor,which plays an important role in creating and accounting for amusing expressions.Meanwhile,Cooperative Principle has a close relationship with verbal humor,and it shows the violation of maxims creating humorous effects and conversational implicature.Moreover,the flouting of Cooperative Principle is the main reason to generate verbal humor.The two aspects rely on each other.Finally,according to selected corpus,this thesis finds that the violation of quality maxim is the most which takes up 36.06%,and the flouting of manner maxim is the least which occupies only 14.90%.Sometimes performers put into use several maxims in the meantime.In the last chapter,this thesis concludes major findings,and then gives a practical application which uses sitcom into English class teaching.American sitcom comes from real life,and points to create a number of amusing dramas which according to peculiar arrangement and scene design that is a creative mode in American English,cultures,social customs and values offering vivid and comprehensive materials to both learners and researchers in order to build an authentic language environment.Moreover,classical dialogues,amusing plots and relaxing atmosphere can greatly assist English learners to practice standard pronunciation.Teachers purpose to develop students' language ability and increase vocabulary,appreciate American cultures and comprehend westerners' value toward life and so on according to American sitcom,and we can say that this is a beneficial way for students to fulfill this goal.Among the rest,students no more study the mode of silent and dumb English,so their listening and speaking skills can be greatly improved.The dialogues in the sitcom make students personally on the scene,and they could also easily imitate actors' conversations.Therefore,analyzing sitcom is a good method for students to master verbal humor.In English teaching,teachers can utilize dialogues as the materials of listening,oral language and reading,to take students into a relaxing atmosphere.Moreover,teachers can also make students practice more including imitating dialogues,finally reaching a state of truly understanding.