Analysis Of Verbal Humor In The Sitcom Modern Family From The Perspective Of Pragmatic Presupposition

As a language phenomenon that is unique to human beings,humor has,for a long time,cast a great influence on peoples' life and the way people perceive things around them.Around the world,humor has drawn the attention of scholars from different fields.Scholars from disciplines such as sociology,psychology and anthropology have long been trying to unveil the generative mechanism behind the humorous phenomenon.Theories like the Cooperative Principle,the Relevance Theory,the Speech Act Theory and the Politeness Principle are widely applied.However,the research on humor phenomenon within the framework of presupposition theory is far from enough.As an important theory in pragmatics,pragmatic presupposition theory has long been used to account for various linguistic phenomenon.Pragmatic presupposition essentially is the assumption of the speaker about the context when uttering a sentence;it is the background information that the speaker assumes to be shared by both parties in a conversation,and it reflects the attitude of the speaker.Pragmatic presupposition is closely associated with the context,and it is highly sensitive to the contextual factors.This thesis adopts the pragmatic presupposition theory to analyze the humorous examples in the sitcom Modern Family with an attempt to figure out the generative mechanism of verbal humor in it.The following two questions are to be solved in this thesis:(1)how does pragmatic presupposition function in triggering the humorous effects in the sitcom?(2)What are the contextual factors and presupposition manipulations leading to the successful application of pragmatic presupposition in the sitcom?The thesis applies the three properties of pragmatic presupposition in the analysis of humorous examples in the sitcom Modern Family.It is found that the three properties of pragmatic presupposition work well in the sitcom to generate humor.Humorous effects can be achieved by applying defeasibility,cancelling the appropriateness and violating the mutual knowledge of pragmatic presupposition.In general,the audiences are provoked to laugh mainly in two ways: one is due to the incongruity between a person's presupposition and the reality;the other is due to evaporation of expectation or assumption.In addition,this thesis analyzes the contextual factors and presupposition manipulations leading to the successful application of pragmatic presupposition in the sitcom.There are two kinds of contextual factors resulting in the application of pragmatic presupposition: one is the linguistic factors which involve intra-sentential context,discourse context and construction of reductio arguments;the other is the non-linguistic factors including the common sense,background knowledge and body language.Besides,three different presupposition manipulations: preset presupposition,false presupposition and contradicted presupposition,can also lead to the successful application of pragmatic presupposition,which further gives rise to humorous effects.Through careful analysis,the following conclusions are reached:(1)Pragmatic presupposition is an essential source for generating humorous effects in the sitcom Modern Family;(2)The three properties of pragmatic presupposition: defeasibility,appropriateness and mutual knowledge all work well in the sitcom Modern Family,among which defeasibility is the key to the successful application of pragmatic presupposition.Theoretically,this study would enrich the researches on pragmatic presupposition and humor.Practically,it would make contributions for the scriptwriters to create more amusing sitcoms.