畢業(yè)論文：A Pragmatic Analysis of Verbal Humor on The Big Bang Theory

A Pragmatic Analysis of Verbal Humor on The Big Bang Theory

A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirement for the Bachelor Degree of Arts


Abstract
Humor is a vey prevalent but comple* phenomenon with a long study history. In the early years, most studies on humor focus on the fields of philosophy, sociology, psychology, and so on. In the recent thirty years, however, with the development of pragmatics, more and more scholars began to study verbal humor from the pragmatic perspective. Sitcom contains a large number of humorous utterances, so it could provide abundant humorous materials for the analysis and study of verbal humor. From the perspective of pragmatics, this thesis intends to apply the Cooperative Principle and the Politeness Principle to e*plore the inner production mechanism of verbal humor by the analysis of the humorous utterances in the American sitcom The Big Bang Theory. At the same time, the author wants to enlighten English learners to understand and appreciate verbal humor from a new view, that is, pragmatic perspective, and give some advice about how to use humor strategy in everyday communication. This research is helpful for us to know the inner production mechanism of verbal humor, and to have a better understanding and appreciation of it.

Key Word: pragmatics; verbal humor; Cooperative Principle; Politeness Principle; The Big Bang Theory



摘要
幽默是一種十分普遍卻又極其復(fù)雜的現(xiàn)象，幽默研究歷史悠久。早期的幽默研究多集中于哲學(xué)、社會學(xué)、心理學(xué)。近三十年來，隨著語用學(xué)的發(fā)展，越來越多的學(xué)者從語用學(xué)的角度分析言語幽默。情景喜劇中含有大量的幽默話語，可以為言語幽默的分析研究提供大量的語料。本文從語用學(xué)角度，運(yùn)用合作原則和禮貌原則的理論分析美國情景喜劇《生活大爆炸》中的大量幽默對白，從而探討言語幽默產(chǎn)生的內(nèi)在機(jī)制。同時(shí)，啟示英語學(xué)習(xí)者從語用學(xué)這一新視角來理解和欣賞言語幽默，并為人們在日常交際中如何使用幽默策略提出建議。此研究有利于我們認(rèn)識言語幽默產(chǎn)生的內(nèi)在機(jī)制，有助于我們理解和欣賞言語幽默。

關(guān)鍵詞：語用學(xué)；言語幽默；合作原則；禮貌原則；《生活大爆炸》


Table of Contents
1 Introduction …………………………………………………………………… 1
1.1 Background of Humor Study ……………………………………………… 1
1.2 Purpose of Verbal Humor Study …………………………………………… 3
1.3 Importance of Verbal Humor Study ………………………………………… 3
1.4 Organization of the Thesis ………………………………………………… 4
2 Pragmatic Approaches to Humor Study ……………………………………… 4
2.1 Cooperative Principle and Conversational Implicature …………………… 4
2.2 Face Theory and Politeness Principle ………………………………………6
3 Research Methodology …
……（新文秘網(wǎng)http://www.120pk.cn省略3537字，正式會員可完整閱讀）……　
ud(1960) proposed his theory of how laughter can release tension and “psychic energy”, which made the relief theories fully develop. He e*plained that“‘Psychic energy’ in our body is built as an aid for suppressing feelings in taboo areas, like se* or death. When this energy is released people e*perience laughter, not only because of the release of this energy, but also because taboo thoughts are being entertained. Humor is the catalyst for the relief through laughter. 2) Superiority theories. This group of theories developed from classical Greek and Roman rhetorical theory, including those theories of humor based on malice, hostility, derision, aggression, disparagement, or superiority. The Superiority Theory of Humor was formulated by Gruner (1997). He e*plained that based on human nature every humorous situation had a winner and a loser; the winner was the one who successfully made fun of the loser; with humor people e*press their own superiority.3) Incongruity theories. Originating from psychological studies of humor, this group of theories has the greatest influence on the study of humor and laughter, and makes up the largest proportion of the modern theories of humor. It was Schopenhuner who proposed incongruity theories of humor that “the cause of laughter in any case is simply the sudden perception of the incongruity between a concept and the real objects, and laughter itself is just the e*pression of the incongruity.”(FANG Chuanyu: 24) In incongruity theories, humor arises from disjointed ill-suited pairings or presentations of idea or situations that are divergent from habitual customs.

Humor and language are interdependent, so it is necessary to study humor from the perspective of linguistic. Since 1970s linguistic approach to humor has become prevalent. There are two most important linguistic theories of humor: one is the Semantics Script Theory of Humor(the SSTH), which is put forward by Raskin with the aim to “formulate the necessary and sufficient conditions, in purely semantic terms, for a te*t to be funny” (Raskin 1985: *iii); the other is the General Theory of Verbal Humor(Attardo& Raskin 1991), which is a combination of Attardo’s five-level joke representation model and Raskin’s SSTH, making up the defects of both the SSTH and Attardo’s model.
In the last twenty years linguistic studies on humor have e*tended to sociolinguistic approaches, cognitive-linguistic approaches, and pragmatic approaches with the development of the linguistics and humor studies. Especially, pragmatic study of humor has become an important part of humor research, and many scholars both abroad and at home apply major pragmatic theories to the analysis of humor, such as the Cooperative Principle, the Politeness Principle, the Relevance Theory, Speech Act Theory and the Face Theory. Raskin (1985) put forward his own CP especially for humor, the cooperative principle for the non-bona-fide communication mode of joke telling, and proposes a definition of the speech act of making a joke. In China, Liu Min (2004) analyses verbal humor with the Speech Act Theory (Quoted in FANF Chuanyu: 38); He Wenzhong (2003) argues that though certain ma*ims of the PP are violated, humor may not threaten face; many scholars, such as Lv Guangdan (1988), Liu Changfu (1987), Chen Chunhua (1999) and Li Lanping (2002), have illustrated how the CP ma*ims are violated in jokes. (Quoted in FANG Chuanyu: 140) This thesis will analyze verbal humor on the sitcom The Big Bang Theory form the pragmatic perspective with CP Theory and PP Theory.

1.2 Purpose of Verbal Humor Study.
Taking humorous utterances in the American sitcom The Big Bang Theory as the analyzing corpus, the author of this thesis will discuss how humorous effects are produced in spontaneous conversational interaction. The purpose of this thesis is to e*plore the inner production mechanism of verbal humor from the pragmatic perspective, based on Grice’s Cooperative Principle Theory and Leech’s Politeness Principle Theory. Furthermore, the author wants to guide English learners to understand and appreciate verbal humor from the pragmatics perspective, and suggest people applying verbal humor as communication strategy in daily life.

1.3 Importance of Verbal Humor Study
Although the scholars mentioned in the above section have demonstrated how the CP and the PP are violated in verbal humor, their studies are e*clusively about joke te*t, rather than humor in spontaneous conversational interaction. This thesis is to study humor involved in naturally occurring conversation. To some degree, it e*tends the research scope of verbal humor. In addition, there is large number of humorous utterances in the sitcom The Big Bang Theory, so it can provide genuine and abundant description data for the author to analyze. Sitcom is close to our life, and some situations in sitcom may happen sometimes in real life. Taking sitcom as study case can enlighten readers to adopt humor strategy in real life.

1.4 Organization of the Thesis
Part one is an introduction of the thesis, including the background, purpose and importance of the study.

Part two is the pragmatic approaches to humor study, which includes Cooperative Principle and its Ma*ims, Conversational Implicature, the Face Theory and the Politeness Principle and its Ma*ims.

Part three is research methodology, in which research procedure and date collection is introduced.

Part four is the major focus of the study, which firstly introduces sitcom and The Big Bang Theory, then applies pragmatic theories to analyze verbal humor on The Big Bang Theory. It includes humor created through flouting CP and its ma*ims and through flouting PP and its ma*ims.

The last Part summarizes the major findings and limitations of the study with suggestions for further study in this area.

2 Pragmatic Approaches to Humor Study
As Attardo(2003) has argues that all humor has a pragmatic component, it is indispensable to study humor from pragmatic perspective. This section will introduce two basic pragmatic theories, the Cooperative Principle and the Politeness Principle, which will be used to analyze the generation mechanism of the verbal humor in this thesis.

2.1 Cooperative Principle and Conversational Implicature
We know that an utterance may allow two interpretations in some situations: the literal meaning and the non-literal meaning. In order to account for such a linguistic phenomenon, Grice(1967) found that tacit agreement e*ists between the speaker and the hearer in all linguistic communicative activities. They follow a set of principles in order to achieve particular communicative goals. Thus, Grice proposed the term of the cooperative principle and its ma*ims.(YANG *inzhang 2005:169)

The CP is that participants in conversation should “Make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, and by the accepted purpose or direction of the e*change in which you are engaged.”(Grice: 44)
1) The Ma*im of Quality
Try to make your contribution one that is true, especially
(i) Do not say what you believe to be false;
(ii) Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.
2) The Ma*im of Quantity
(i) Make your contribution as informative as is required for the current purpose of the e*change
(ii) Do not make your contribution more informative than is required.
3) The Ma*im of Relation
Make your contribution relevant.
4) The Ma*im of Manner
Be perspicuous and specifically:
(i) Avoid obscurity of e*pression;
(ii) Avoid ambiguity;
(iii) Be brief (avoid unnecessary proli*ity);
(iv) Be orderly.
In short, the CP mean ……（未完，全文共55224字，當(dāng)前僅顯示9932字，請閱讀下面提示信息。收藏《畢業(yè)論文：A Pragmatic Analysis of Verbal Humor on The Big Bang Theory》）