Differences Between Chinese And American Verbal Humor From Pragmatic Principles

Verbal communication is a bilateral or multilateral speech act.In order to achieve an ideal communicative goal,language users should obey some basic principles,which are generally called pragmatic principles.Cooperative principle(CP)and politeness principle(PP)are two main pragmatic principles.CP is put forward by H.P.Grice,an American philosopher and linguist,in the speech called “Logic and Conversation” in Harvard University.He thought that verbal communication is always mutually cooperative.The smooth accomplishment of communication is ensured only by cooperation.Grice put forward four maxims under CP and each maxim has its respective sub-maxims.(Grice,1967).PP is raised as a remedy for CP.Leech put forward PP and thought that PP is a necessary supplement to avoid a series of troubles caused by incomplete CP.PP has six maxims while each maxim includes 2 sub-maxims.(Leech,1983).In communication,people always observe these pragmatic principles which is very common,but sometimes situations like not observing these principles happen.However,these situations do not mean the failure of communication,on the contrary,disobey pragmatic principles with intention or without intention produce the effect of humor.Recently,much more verbal humor appear in many TV series due to the violations of pragmatic principles.This method of generating the effect of humor is very obvious in both Chinese TV series “Home with Kids” and American TV series “Modern Family”.Chinese TV series “Home with Kids” tells a number of stories happening among a pair of stepparents and three kids after a marriage of two divorced family.This TV series? target audience are supposed to be children and parent,but high audience rating indicates target audience are broader than expected.According to its high level of popularity,“Home with Kids” has four series.This situation happens on “Modern Family”,too.It has five series at present and continuously won the Emmy for Outstanding TV Series in a Comedy Series for five times.This TV series tell stories of life of three typical American family.From the most common word games to amusing dialogues,“Modern Family” can let audience adapt easily to various jokes which shows its high extent of humor.The verbal humor in the stories of these two TV series is very rich.The reasons why author chooses these two TV series to be the objects of study are that they have many characteristics in common such as their same theme “family life”,comic TV series type and their popularity in their respective origin of country.Their only difference is their origin of country.Therefore,the author chooses these two highly comparable TV series to compare and analyze to prominent the theme of verbal humor difference under different cultural background.Like most audience,the author likes enjoying this appearance of actors? humorous performance.However,as a major of linguistics,the author hopes she can analyze these underlying causes and inner mechanism of verbal humor from the perspective of pragmatic principles especially from the perspective of CP and PP in linguistics.CP and PP has multiple maxims and the desperate or unconscious violation of them will generate the effect of humor.This thesis combines CP and PP,adopts contrast analytical method,uses two popular Chinese and American TV series “Home with Kids” and “Modern Family” to be the objects of research,chooses 10 episodes respectively,uses many sub-maxims of CP and PP,analyzes differences of Chinese and American verbal humor,and finds the reasons why these differences appear based on the mechanism of generation of humor.To some extent,this thesis has both theoretical and practical meanings.In terms of theory,firstly,this study is based on pragmatic principles and focus on differences existing between Chinese and American verbal humor,so it enriches communication theory system,especially in terms of works of TV series and movies.Secondly,this study aims at helping people gain more understanding of cross-cultural communication under different cultural backgrounds by analyzing dialogues of Chinese and American TV series.At last,this study enriches and develops the theory of verbal humor.In terms of practice,on the one hand,this study offers advisable methods to communicate smoothly with each other under different cultural backgrounds,on the other hand,this thesis guides people to improve the practical ability of being humorous in daily life,strengthen the sense of humor and promote the harmonious interpersonal relationship by analyzing and summarizing the formation mechanism of verbal humor.This essay includes six chapters.The first chapter is the introduction which introduces the research background,the main issue,the target,the importance and the basic structure of the thesis.The second chapter is the theoretical review which includes the relevant theories the thesis mainly involves such as the verbal communication,cross-cultural communication,PP and CP and their respective application in the practice and the verbal humor.The third chapter talks about the relation between pragmatic principles and the verbal humor which is the generation of humor effect because of the violation of pragmatic principles.The fourth chapter is the application of the theories above in both “Home with Kids” and “Modern Family”.In the fifth chapter,the author concludes some tables of data that state the different frequencies of the violation of pragmatic principles.Then the author analyzes some reasons of the differences between the Chinese and American verbal humor.The sixth chapter is the conclusion of this study.At the same time,the author puts forward the limitations of this study.Because the objects of research are limited,the characters of TV series are diverse and that discourse personality is strong,so there is some effects on the objectivity and generality of research results.The author hopes that if conditions are permitted,she will choose more objects of research,increase the length of thesis and concludes all results in a book.