老友记幽默言语行为分析-an analysis of friends humorous speech act.docxVIP

the results can be generated to show how humorous speech acts in Friends perform the illocutionary force of eliciting laughter, which paves the way for discussing the deep reasons. The results of the study show that the successful performance of humorous speech acts in Friends rests a lot with the co-effects of the humorist (humor producer) who intentionally uses certain linguistic means or violates some logical or communicative rules in the process of communication, and the interpreter (audience) who should be equipped with relevant cultural background knowledge. It is worth pointing out that the quantities of linguistic means adopted account for 82.4% characterized by phonological means including intonation, tone, phonological mocking and phonological ambiguity, lexical means including neologism and lexical ambiguity, semantic means including semantic ambiguity and semantic turn, 28 rhetorical devices including irony, euphemism, metaphor, hyperbole, transferred wording and so forth. The employment of logical rules and communicative rules account for 9.1% and 8.5% respectively characterized by sophistry and violence of the relevance rule respectively. In addition, it is found that apart from the knowledge about background plots of this comedy, there are 168 items of humorous speech acts accounting for about 4% calling for audience’s relevant cultural knowledge including history, geography, religion, social customs and so forth so as to interpret humorous effects successfully. A lot of examples in Friends are cited by the present author to illustrate the results. In Chapter 5, the main reasons for the above-mentioned performative means are discussed, including the linguistic features of English as well as their influences on American way of thinking, western values rooted in English humor and their effects on the employment of rhetorical means, the playwriting of the sitcom, etc. The discussion of reasons has an explanatory force for the performative m