从会话含义角度解读《老友记》的言语幽默效果
关键词 言语幽默 会话含意 合作原则 毕 业 论 文 外 文 摘 要
Title On the Effect of Verbal Humor in Friends from the Perspective of Conversational Implicature
Abstract
This paper focuses on analyzing the effect of verbal humor in the famous American sitcom Friends from the perspective of Conversational Implicature of Pragmatics. Although the effects of humor in this sitcom are presented in various forms, what is in common is that the dialogues between the actors and the actresses are usually beyond the expectations of the audiences, and then produce the “laughing point”——the humorous implicature. To make the dialogues humorous, the actors would always violate the four maxims of Cooperative Principle: the maxim of Quantity, the maxim of Quality, the maxim of Relation, and the maxim of Manner. Through exploring the pragmatic rules of verbal humor, the study is expected to improve people’s comprehension and appreciation of American humor, thereby contribute to the deeper understanding of the inherent law of English language.
Keywords verbal humor Conversational Implicature Cooperative Principle
Table of Contents
1 Introduction 1
1.1 Background 1
1.2 Approach 1
2 Conversational Implicature and Friends 2
2.1 Development of Conversational Implicature 2
2.2 Cooperative Principle 3
2.2.1 Emergence of Cooperative Principle and its General Conception 3
2.2.2 Four Maxims of Cooperative Principle 3
2.3 A Brief Introduction to the Subject Friends 6
3 Effect of Verbal Humor in Friends 7
3.1 Introduction 7
3.2 Violation of the Maxim of Quantity 7
3.3 Violation of the Maxim of Quality 8
3.4 Violation of the Maxim of Relation 9
3.5 Violation of the Maxim of Manner 11
Conclusion 12
Acknowledgements 13
Bibliography 14
1 Introduction
1.1 Background
As a young branch of pragmatics, Conversational Implicature (henceforth CI) aims at discovering how people manage to understand implied meaning in communication. Since the establishment of this theory — when in 1967, as a linguist and a philosopher, Paul Grice made a speech in Harvard University on this topic, CI has been proved useful in a wide range of fields, such as analyses of daily conversations, and has helped explain how messages encoded with different meanings are successfully passed on from the speaker to the listener.
To further explain this theory, researches have been conducted by many famous linguists, including Leech (1983), Levinson (1983), Peccei (2000), Yule (2000) and so on. These researches contribute to the adaptability of the theory of CI, thus making it possible for other scholars to use it as a practical tool to deal with more questions.