中英情景喜剧中幽默策略的对比研究——以《老友记》和《爱情公寓》为例-a comparative study of humorous strategies in chinese and english situation comedies —— taking friends and ipartment as examples.docxVIP

Harbin Harbin Institute of Technology Graduation Thesis for the MA Degree 哈尔滨工业大学硕士论文 -ii- -ii- Abstract In recent years, humor strategies in sitcoms have become a heated topic in the research field of linguistics. Humor study in the west explores three conventional humor theories, the semantic-script theory of humor and the general theory of verbal humor, while Chinese scholars tend to analyze humorous utterances in sitcoms, cross talks and talk shows from the perspective of pragmatics, cognitive linguistics and rhetoric. This study compares humorous utterances in Ipartment and those in Friends, aiming to explore humor strategies employed in sitcoms and the similarities and differences of humor strategies used in Chinese and English sitcoms via the research method of case study. The study can help people with their appreciation of humorous literature, and meanwhile, can bring them enlightenment about how to create and interpret a verbal humor appropriately in intercultural activities. Two episodes are picked out of Ipartment and Friends respectively as the research discourses, and then verbal humors in the chosen discourses are identified and marked. Based on the context, those marked humorous utterances are analyzed in the discourse analysis approach from perspectives of Cooperative Principle, Politeness Principle, Relevance Theory, presupposition and deixis. Thereby the marked verbal humors are categorized. Main findings of the study are: 1. The two sitcoms both employ the following five humor strategiesthe speaker flouts the Cooperative Principle; the speaker violates or abides by the Politeness Principle; there is a gap between the maximal relevance and the optimal relevance; the speaker’s presupposition is unreasonable; deixis is used in an inappropriate context. 2. In both Chinese and English sitcoms of the case study, the humor strategy of flouting the Cooperative Principle is most -iii- -iii- commonly used among the above five humor strategies. 3. The