A Comparative Analysis Of Sino-US Verbal Humor From A Cross-cultural Perspective

As a special part of the language,humor has been a key mean to promote interpersonal communication.It is also beneficial for the Sino-US culture exchange if we appreciate humor and become better users of humor in cross-cultural communication.Therefore,the study on humor has a great theory value as well as practical significance.The paper is based on the study of verbal humor at home and abroad,taking the Sino-US verbal humor in two sitcoms for research objects,and the Love Apartment and The Big Bang Theory according to the Cooperative Principle,the Relevance Theory and the Speech Acts Theory,both of quantitative study and qualitative study are used in the study of the comparative analysis of Sino-US verbal humor,we summarize the reason that cause differences of the Sino-US verbal humor and give some advice in cross-cultural communication.The structure of this paper is as follows:Chapter one is an introduction about the research target,the current situation of research on verbal humor and a brief description of the corpus sources.This chapter also expounds theoretic value and the practical meaning of the topic.The second chapter discusses the similarity of Sino-US verbal humor which shown in the generative mechanism of verbal humor.This part interprets the generative mechanism of verbal humor in three aspects: verbal humor and semantic,rhetorical devices of verbal humor,verbal humor and three main pragmatics theories: the Cooperative Principle,the Relevance Theory and the Speech Acts Theory.Chapter three examines the difference of the Sino-US verbal humor with the qualitative and quantitative analysis methods,through the two examples of the Sino-US sitcoms,we analyze the difference of verbal humor from three aspects: the topic of humor,the joking target,and the joking occasions.In the chapter four,we discuss four factors that cause the difference of the Sino-US verbal humor: the history and geography,the traditional ideas,the way of thinking and the values.We also give some advice based on the understanding difference of Sino-US verbal humor in this chapter,we should accept different culture from American and China,overcome the ethnocentrism,develop the empathy ability and strengthen analysis on context.In the conclusion section,we summarize the main views of this paper,innovation and perspective of further researches.