合作原则视角下《老爸老妈浪漫史》中的言语幽默分析
Chapter 1 Introduction
1.1 Research Background
Humor, as an integral part of life, exists in nearly every field of life. It is a unique and universal communicative method of human beings which is embodied in many fields such as newspapers, magazines, dramas, literature, films, and situation comedies. As one of human being’s life attitude, humor is widely used in our daily life throughout every nation, every race and culture. It can not only bring people a lot of fun, but also help people avoid embarrassment. Humor which can help people create a relaxed and eased atmosphere often makes people become easier and happier in social relationship and communications. Humor helps people increase the intimacy and shorten the distance with others. Moreover, humor deals with the life stress effectively as it bring laugh to people and release the bad emotions. Nowadays, more and more people live with great pressure, therefore humor is very necessary for people to counteract the effects of stress and remove it from themselves. Meanwhile, it is also a good way to smooth and strengthen the interpersonal relationship. The study on humor is focused by a lot of scholars through many disciplines including psychology, sociology, anthropology, ethnology, aesthetics, linguistics and so on. The early study of humor originated from the aspect of philosophy and literary critics. With the development of the study on humor, it appealed to the interest of scholars from other subjects. Thus, the study on humor gradually became a comprehensive and integrated multi-disciplinary field. According to Attardo(1994), linguists acquired a role among the central players of humor research, which were traditionally psychologists, sociologists, and philosophers until the late 1970s. After that the linguist pays more attention to the humor study. There is close connection between language and humor. On the one hand, language itself gradually becomes the subject of humor. The creation of humor widely applies the elements of language including its phonological, morphological, syntactic, and semantic part.
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1.2 The Significance of the Study
In this thesis, Grice’s CP theory will be applied in the analysis of verbal humor. Cooperative Principle is the main theory in pragmatics. In the past, it is often employed to analyze the conversation in the real contractions or the given texts. Meanwhile, although situation comedy is one of the successful and remarkable carriers of verbal humor, there are few researchers to analyze it. Therefore, the CP theory may become a new tool to elaborate and evaluate the American situation comedy. In addition, it is also a good way to amend the established CP theory as it is used to analyze the modern language materials. All in all, it may make contributions to this field by this kind of study. With the development of globalization, American situation comedy becomes more and more popular with people especially in China. As wide spread of internet, people can be easier to share the internet sources. Therefore American TV series are well received in Chinese audience. In particular, most of people especially English learners believe that it is an effective way to learn English by watching American situation comedy. However, we have to admit that sometimes we can not really understand the humor in American sitcoms. Therefore, analyzing the verbal humor in American sitcoms from the perspective of pragmatics can not only help Chinese audience have a deeper comprehension of their verbal humor, but also a kind of innovative way for learners to learn English.
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Chapter 2 Literature Review
In this chapter, the author is devoted to present the nature of humor according to its definition and classification. And the detailed study on humor including the general view of humor is mentioned. Meanwhile, the situation comedy’s study is necessary to talk about in this part. Also, there is a specific introduction of the chosen sitcom How I Met Your Mother in this chapter. What’s more, Cooperative Principle, the framework of the thesis will be referred and discussed.
2.1 Humor
As there is no controversial and accurate definition of humor, in this section the author will mention several definitions of humor according to different sources. In the following part, it will have several definitions based on different dictionaries and books. After that, the classification of humor will be elaborated to help people to understand the study well. Humor, as an art of social contact, has a particularly close connection with our daily life. We can almost find it in everywhere such as books, magazines, movies and conversations. It is the spice of life which can help people shorten interpersonal distance and increase the intimacy of people. Meanwhile, humor can bring people a lot of fun and create the relaxing environment which can ease the pressure of people. Therefore, humor plays an important role in our social contact and daily life. However, at present, there is no accurate and precise definition of humor. It seems that different scholars and researchers have different views and definitions of humor.
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2.2 General Review of Humor
This part will discuss the previous studies and findings on verbal humor which mainly includes the conventional theories of humor and the modern linguistics theories of humor. Generally speaking, three basic conventional theories on verbal humor are presented in this section including the incongruity theory, superiority theory as well as release theory. Meanwhile, from the perspective of modern linguistic theory, there are two most famous theories mainly including Raskin’s Semantic Theory of Humor (shortened as SSTH) and the General Theory of Verbal Humor (Shortened as GTVH) that is pointed out to present a comprehensive illustration of verbal humor. What’s more, the related studies on verbal humor will be talked about in this section at the same time.
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Chapter 3 Theoretical Framework....... 20
3.1 Cooperative Principle...... 20
3.2 The Violation of the Cooperative Principle........ 23
3.2.1 The Violation of the Quantity Maxim...... 23
3.2.2 The Violation of the Quality Maxim ........ 24
3.2.3 The Violation of the Relation Maxim ...... 24
3.2.4 The Violation of Manner Maxim ...... 25
Chapter 4 Research Methodology....... 26
4.1 Research Questions ........ 26
4.2 Data Collection......... 27
4.3 Research Procedure ........ 28
Chapter 5 Analysis of Verbal Humor from the Perspective of CP ........ 29
5.1 The Violation of Quantity Maxim......... 30
5.1.1 More Information........ 31
5.1.2 Less Information.......... 33
5.2 The Violation of Quality Maxim .... 35
5.2.1 Irony ....... 37
5.2.2 Metaphor ...... 40
5.2.3 Hyperbole...... 42
5.2.4 Meiosis .......... 44
5.2.5 Rhetorical Questions .......... 45
5.3 The Violation of Relation Maxim ......... 46
5.4 The Violation of Manner Maxim.......... 48
Chapter 5 Analysis of Verbal Humor from the Perspective of CP
In this part, the author focuses on the analysis of verbal humor in the sitcom How I Met Your Mother from the perspective of Cooperative Principle and its maxims. Situation comedy is very popular nowadays. And humor plays an important role in the sitcom as it is the magic key to attract large amount of audience especially young audience. Through watching the situation comedy, the audience can feel relaxed and reduce great pressure of life because the dialogues between the characters are usually funny and interesting. So verbal humor helps produce humorous effect and has great effect on the success of situation comedy. For sake of studying how humorous effect is produced by flouting the cooperative principle, the author will analyze verbal humor chosen from the sitcom in the following part. According to the chosen 20 episodes from the sitcom “How I Met Your Mother”, there are 1136 items of verbal humor which is defined by the background’s laughter and the author’s own comprehension. Among these, there are 632 items produced by violating the Cooperative Principle and its maxims. And the distribution of verbal humor by violating the maxims of CP will be shown in the following tables.
Conclusion
Based on the above analysis, the author will present the major findings and implications in detail. Meanwhile, this chapter will present the limitation of the research and then give some suggestions for the study in the future. In this research, the author analyzes the verbal humor in the sitcom “How I Met Your Mother” from the perspective of cooperative principle. Through analyzing examples of verbal humor in the situation comedy, it proves that verbal humor can be generated by violation the CP and its maxims. It is very useful to study the verbal humor in literary works from pragmatic angle. The author will present the major findings as follow: This research aims to find out the generation mechanism of verbal humor in the sitcom. Based on the analysis, the study result shows that violation of the CP and its maxims plays important role in the generation of verbal humor in the sitcom “How I Met Your Mother”. According to the quantitative analysis, the author finds that there are 1136 items of verbal humor in the chosen 20 episodes of the sitcom. Among these items, there are 632 items of humor which take up more than 50% percentage of total items of humor generated by violating the CP and its maxims. Meanwhile, violating the quality maxim takes up the highest percentage among these 632 items. It proves that most of the verbal humor in the sitcom is produced by the violation of CP especially violation the quality maxim and the Cooperative Principle has great effect on the humorous effect. In the qualitative analysis, the research presents the specific generation mechanism of verbal humor from the angle of the CP by analyzing the typical examples. It proves the generation of verbal humor in the specific and intensive way. Therefore, we can draw a conclusion that the CP theory takes up essential place in the generation of verbal humor in the sitcom.
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The reference (omitted)
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