A Pragmatic Study Of The Creation Of Humor Of Feng Xiaogang’s New Year Movies

Feng Xiaogang’s movies as the pioneer of "new year movie" in the mainland have become the focus of popular attention. The simple but fresh language of his movies brings out the unique "Feng’s humor", which has become a popular symbol among the public culture. Many researches have been conducted to analyze Feng Xiaogang’s new year movies from different perspectives. However, from the literature available, it is found that most of the researches focus on the literature, filmlogy and art of Feng’s works. Few tentative studies have been made of "Feng’s humor" from the perspectives of the Cooperative Principle and the Politeness Principle.Based on a review of previous studies on new year movies, this thesis selects classic movie dialogues from seven new year movies of Feng Xiaogang’s as a research corpus, studies the humor produced from the perspectives of the flouting of the Cooperative Principle (CP) and the Politeness Principle (PP), and then attempts to explore the mechanism underlying Feng’s humorous language to reveal the real reason for "Feng’s humor".The thesis adopts both quantitative and qualitative studies. Quantitative research is used to find out the distribution of the occurrences of the cases of flouting the CP and the PP and what characterizes the humorous language in Feng’s new year movies and frequency of the humorous utterances by flouting of the CP and the PP and summarize the common characteristics of the humorous language in Feng Xiaogang’s new year movies. Qualitative research is undertaken to analyze how humor in Feng’s new year movies is generated by the flouting of the maxims of the CP and the PP. The present studies lead to four findings. First, most of the humorous effect in Feng Xiaogang’s new year movies is realized by flouting the maxims of the CP and the PP. Second, a majority of the humors in Feng Xiaogang’s new year movies are achieved by more extensively flouting the maxims of the CP compared with the PP. Third, among the flouting of the maxims of the CP, the Quality maxim is the most frequently flouted, while the Maxim of Manner is the least frequently flouted. Among the flouting of the maxims of the PP, the Generosity Maxim is the most frequently flouted, while the Maxim of Sympathy is the least frequently flouted. Fourth, generally, the character of the language in Feng’s new year movies as follows:first of all, as far as the flouting of the Maxim of the CP is concerned, the language in Feng Xiaogang’s new year movies is achieved by applying many rhetorical devices, like irony, hyperbole, repetition and metaphor. Moreover, as for the flouting of the CP and the PP, this thesis reveals the pragmatic features of Feng’s humorous languages by using the spoken language, dialect and euphemism.To sum up, this study may be of great theoretical and practical significance. On the one hand, this study is expected to set light on the further investigations on other linguistic phenomena from the perspectives of the CP and the PP. On the other hand, the findings, to some extent, make some contributions to the appreciation of the production and perception of humor in Feng Xiaogang’s new year movies.