关联论视角下对比分析情景喜剧中的言语幽默

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Chapter One Introduction

1.1 Motivation of the study

Looking around the world we are living in, we can easily find that there are a large

number of humor with plenty of forms and contents, which pervade almost every

aspect of our life. For example, in those great variety of newspapers and magazines,

there are certain special column or pages in the name like "Fun Time" or "Humor and

Jokes" etc.. To begin with, let's take a look at the following example,

" Do you believe in life after death?" the boss asked one of his employees.

"Yes, Sir." the new recruit replied. " Well, then, that makes everything just fine," the boss went

on. " After you left early yesterday to go to your grandmother's funeral, she stopped in to see you.

From the conversation we can conclude that the employee told a lie the day before the

conversation. When we read the first few sentences of this conversation, we may

wonder what the boss intends to do and whether the work this day has something to

do with the topic of life after death. As the conversation goes on till the end, the

employee and the readers tumble to the reason and the boss's intention at a stroke: he

is criticizing the employee for his telling lies yesterday. Compared with a direct

criticism by the boss like "you told a lie yesterday by saying that you were going to

your grandma's funeral, because she came here to see you later that day", the boss's

use of an indirect and euphemistic way not only helps the boss to achieve his intention

more successfully, but also has a better and greater effect on the employee. The

readers cannot help speaking highly of the boss's tactical and strategical use of

language and finally have a pleasant feeling and enjoy the humor in it.

For some reason, the speaker does not want to, or cannot, or is not allowed to express

A Contrastive Study of Humor in Sitcoms from Relevance Theory

his/her intention in a direct and overt way, so he/she would tend to choose a kind of

indirect way to express himself/herself in that certain context, in which he/she

presupposes that the hearer can understand him immediately or after taking a short

while to think about it. In other words, the speaker is getting his real intention

achieved under the disguise of some indirect way of expression. In spite of those

indirect expression, the moment the hearer understands the speaker's real intention,

communication succeeds, and so does the humor.

In addition, there are also a lot of other forms which offer humor and fun, especially

crosstalks and sketches. And in the past two decades, a large number of situation

comedies, or sitcoms for short, a newly-emerging television program in China, have

sprung up and have been well received in that the audience can have great fun from

them. Sitcoms create great fun and humor via various kinds of funny language forms

and behaviours, so they are widely considered to be a huge carrier of humor and

enjoying an increasingly greater popularity. As a matter of fact, stories in sitcoms are

miniature of many kinds of events in our life, thus, the functions that humor performs

in stories of sitcoms are same as the functions that humor does in our actual life. For

example, humor can entertain our life, ease a lot of tension, relax ourselves, improve

the interpersonal relation and so on and so forth. In a word, we have reason to believe

that it serves as a lubricant in our life.

So in this thesis, a detailed study of humor in sitcoms will be conducted from

Relevance Theory. And a contrastive study in an American sitcom and a Chinese

sitcom will be done to probe into how humor is produced and interpreted.

1.2 Methodology and Data Collection

Sitcoms originated from America and were introduced into China in the 1990s. So

Chinese sitcoms are the combination of forms of western sitcoms with characteristics

Chapter One Introduction

of Chinese culture. It is inevitable that American sitcoms and Chinese sitcoms differ

from each other in a lot of aspects. Therefore, this thesis takes a contrastive method to

study the mechanism of humor in different sitcoms.

The data used in this thesis includes two popular sitcoms: an American sitcom

Everybody Loves Raymond which has won 15 Emmy Awards and been broadcast on

TV in America since 1996 and later in 2005 been introduced into CCTV in China and

is widely reported to be typical of American humor; a Chinese sitcom Stories of A

Kitchen Unit which is the first sitcom broadcast on CCTV and by far has won a lot of

national prizes in China like Feitian Award, Golden Eagle Award and Golden Star

Award, and covers most of the characteristics of Chinese humor.

Humor in sitcoms consisits of many aspects, generally speaking, such as humor

produced by body languages, by picture factors, by verbal language and so on. Verbal

language is the focus of the present study. To put it specifically, verbal-expressed

humor includes humor produced from phonological elements, semantic elements,

syntactic elements, rhetorical elements and so on. Therefore, in this thesis, a variety of

humorous languages are collected and selected carefully from these two sitcoms. In

addition to the working definition of humor given in the following chapter, the criteria

for identifying a funny conversation as humor in this thesis, on one hand, depends on

the speaker's intention to solve a certain problem in a humorous way, on the other

hand, depends on the response of the audience: whether the audience get fun and take

a tumble from them.

1.3 The Objectives of the Study

The present study is intended to account for the humor production and interpretation

in sitcoms from the framework of Relevance Theory, a very important theory in

pragmatics. By far a great many researchers have studied humor from other theories

A Contrastive Study of Humor in Sitcoms from Relevance Theory

of pragmatics such as Cooperative Principle, Politeness Principle, or Speech Act

Theory and so on, but these researches lay more stress on the production of humor

and little on the interpretation of humor. However, Relevance Theory attempts a lot

more to probe into both the production and the interpretation of humor in details.

The production and interpretation of humor involves a communication between the

humorist (the speaker in sitcoms) and the audience. In this thesis, the author conducts

her study from these two aspects: the speaker who strategically produces a humorous

utterance which he supposes to help achieve his intention and to be well understood

by the audience; and the audience who tries to interpret the humor by seeking optimal

relevance and getting the speaker's intention in order to understand the speaker better.

Therefore, the goals of this study are not only to study humor production and

interpretation in sitcoms based on the framework of Relevance Theory, but also to

help people to enjoy humor in sitcoms better and acquire humor competence to

achieve their intention more efficiently.

1.4 The Organization of the Thesis

The whole thesis consists of five chapters. Chapter one is an introduction about this

thesis, as presented at the moment, introducing the motivation of the study, the

objectives of the study, and the overall organization of the study.

Chapter two is the literature review. This part gives a general review of the research

history of humor from ancient times to the present day, including the controversial

definition of humor, the classification of humor, as well as some notable theories from

perspective such as rhetorics, physiology, psychology and linguistics. What's more,

the author gives her own definition of humor, which is used for her present analysis of

humor in sitcoms.

Chapter One Introduction

Chapter three is a detailed introduction of Relevance Theory, namely, the theoretical

framework of this present study. In this part, some main notions involved in

Relevance Theory will be stated and explained in details, including the definition of

relevance, context, contextual effect, processing effort, the principle of relevance and

optimal relevance, all of which are used to lay a solid theoretical foundation for the

analysis of humor in chapter four.

Chapter four is the most important part of the thesis. At first, the author talks about

features of humorous languages in sitcoms. Then based on the main notions and

principle in RT, the author makes a detailed analysis of the production and the

interpretation of humor excerpted from two sitcoms. In addition, the author conducts a

brief contrastive analysis of humor in American sitcoms and Chinese sitcoms.

Chapter five is the concluding part, summing up the main findings of the study, the

limitations of the study, and some suggestions for further research.

A Contrastive Study of Humor in Sitcoms from Relevance Theory

Chapter Two Literature Review

Over centuries, humor, as a quite common but particular language phenomenon in

communication, has been arousing great interest of scholars in many fields such as

rhetoric, physiology, psychology, philosophy, linguistics, aesthetics, cognitive science

and so on. It plays a more and more important role in our life. A large number of

attempts at creating humor have clearly proved its prevalence and significance.

Moreover, we find that humor has a lot of advantages, or to be technical, functions,

for example, to amuse people, to ease a tension, to solve a problem, to modulate the

interpersonal relationships, to fight against an opponent and so on and so forth. People

have been trying to create humor in certain context to achieve their intention

skillfully.

2.1 Definition of Humor

Over thousands of years, a lot of scholars have made studies on humor, from Plato

and Aristotle, through Kant, to the more recent Bergerson, Freud, Norrick and Attardo

and so on, and they have achieved a lot. However, by far there is still quite a lot of

controversy about what humor is in essence and there is even not a consensus on the

definition of humor. Researchers have provided different kinds of definitions that may

best meet some particular need in their study and can only explain certain aspects of

humor.

The term "humor" has its origin in Latin. It derives from a Latin word "humere",

meaning "to flow or be wet". It was believed that humor refers to four bodily fluids:

choler/ yellow bile, melancholy/ black bile, blood, and phlegm. All these four fluids

determine one's mood or temperament. One's temperament depends on which of the

four humor fluids is dominant. A person with the four fluids in good balance was

thought to be in "good humor", whereas a person with any kind of imbalance among

these four fluids was seen to be "out of humor", or eccentric. By far, through

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摘要：

ChapterOneIntroduction1ChapterOneIntroduction1.1MotivationofthestudyLookingaroundtheworldwearelivingin,wecaneasilyfindthattherearealargenumberofhumorwithplentyofformsandcontents,whichpervadealmosteveryaspectofourlife.Forexample,inthosegreatvarietyofnewspapersandmagazines,therearecertainspecialcolumn...

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