A Pragmatic Analysis of the Humor in American Sitcom Friends

Abstract

For a long time, people have regarded humor as a common phenomena instead of an important subject. A qualitative research is conducted and the mechanism of verbal humor generation is analyzed within the theoretical framework of the cooperative principle and the politeness principle. This thesis studies the humor in Friends from the perspective of pragmatics. and it consists of three parts. Part One gives a introduction on the present study of the humor in Friends; Part Two shows the theoretical framework of CP, and analyses the humor in Friends from the view of cooperative principle; Part Three shows the theoretical framework of PP, and analyses the humor in Friends from the view of politeness principle. At last a conclusion is made to this thesis, summing up the major findings, the limitations and the suggestions of the present thesis for further researches. The conclusion could be that humor is generated by flouting those pragmatic principles. The aim of the thesis is to improve the understanding ability of the English learners and to arouse their interest in humorous sentences in English, and then to enhance their ability of English application.

Key words:  Friends   humor  cooperation principle  politeness principle    

Contents

Introduction 4

Chapter One The Study of Humor and Sitcom 6

1.1 The Study of Humor 6

1.2 The Study of Sitcom 6

Chapter Two Verbal Humor from the Perspective of Cooperative Principle 8

2.1 Cooperative Principle 8

2.2. Politeness Principle 9

Chapter Three Verbal Humor from the Perspective of Politeness Principle 10

3.1 Humor by Flouting the Maxims of Cooperative Principle 10

3.2 Humor by Flouting the maxims of Politeness Principle 13

Conclusion 18

Notes 19

Bibliography 20