言语幽默语用分析

　 1

　Contents

　 Chinese Abstract .....................................................................................2 English Abstract .....................................................................................3 1. Introduction ........................................................................................4 1.1 Background of The Study.................................................................................... 4 1.2 Objective and Significance of The Study ............................................................ 5

　2. Literature Review ...............................................................................5 2.1 Previous Study of The Big Bang Theory ............................................................. 5 2.2 Previous Study on Relevance Theory ................................................................. 6

　3. Pragmatic Analysis of The Big Bang Theory from The Perspective of Relevance Theory ...............................................................................7 3.1 Humorous Effects in The Big Bang Theory Achieved by The Gap between Maximum and Optimal Relevance ............................................................................ 7 3.2 Humorous Effects in The Big Bang Theory Achieved by The Gap Between Ostentation and Inference ........................................................................................ 10 3.3 Humorous Effects in The Big Bang Theory Achieved by The Differences of Cognitive Context .................................................................................................... 12

　4. Conclusion .........................................................................................14 References .............................................................................................16

　 2

　关联理论视角下《生活大爆炸》言语幽默的语用分析

　摘

　要

　幽默是一种特殊的语言手段，以其逗趣的功能在人们日常生活交际中扮演着重要的角色。其中，言语幽默是幽默最常用也是最有效的技巧之一，正确地理解和表达言语幽默不仅能给我们带来快乐，而且可以使人与人之间的沟通与交流更进一步。因此，对于幽默会话的研究是具有重要意义的。

　近年来，情景喜剧越来越流行，逐渐受到全球各国的观众接受和喜爱。其中，美国热门情景喜剧《生活大爆炸》收视率名列前茅，颇受年轻人喜爱。故事中人物之间风趣的对话，滑稽的评论以及极具讽刺意味的玩笑都一一表现了生动直观的美式幽默的魅力。本文运用关联理论的三大原则对剧中的幽默会话进行研究，揭露幽默产生背后的机制，探究幽默会话所使用的技巧。文中将幽默会话根据关联程度的不同，明示与推理的差别和认知语境的差距三个方面所产生的不同的幽默效果进行研究，帮助英语学习者们更好地欣赏情景喜剧，提高对幽默的理解与欣赏。

　 关键词：幽默；情景喜剧；关联理论；《生活大爆炸》

　 3

　The Pragmatic Analysis of Verbal

　Humor in The

　Big Bang Theory

　from The

　Perspective of Relevance Theory

　Abstract Humor is regarded as a special language strategy, and it plays an important role in daily communication. Moreover, verbal humor is one of the most common and effective skills among humor. The right expression and understanding of verbal humor can not only bring us happiness, but also make interpersonal communications between people better. Therefore, the study of humorous conversations is of great significance. For the past few years, sitcoms is becoming increasing popular and are accepted as one of audiences’ favorite television shows gradually. Among them, a popular American sitcom The Big Bang Theory was among the top ratings and was extremely popular among youngsters. The interesting dialogues, funny comments and ironic jokes from the characters all show the charm of vivid and intuitive American humor. Based on the three principles of Relevance Theory, this thesis analyses the humorous conversations in the sitcom, furthermore reveals the mechanism about how humor is generated and studies the skills of humorous conversations. Furthermore, this thesis will study the humorous conversations according to the gap between the maximum relevance and optimal relevance, the gap between the ostentation and inference and the differences of cognitive context, so as to help English learners better appreciate sitcoms and improve their understanding and appreciation of humor.

　 Key words: humor; Sitcom; Relevance Theory; The Big Bang Theory

　 4

　1. Introduction

　1.1 Background of The Study

　 From the time of Plato and Aristotle in the fourth century B.C, Humor had been the most enduring and earliest subject of study. For the next two thousand years, some scholars study humor from different fields and the others study from different methods and different views, then they make a summary of humorous theory involved linguistics, rhetoric, aesthetics, philosophy and sociology and so on. Some foreign researchers use psychology to study humor and build three predominant theories in humor: superiority theory, incongruity theory and release theory. The three humorous theories offer latter learners a well theoretical environment to study humor. Over the centuries, the study of humor has made greater progress. Studies in linguistics, semantics, syntax, stylistics, and pragmatics have provided a broader perspective and a newer perspective for humor. In semantic studies, Semantic Script Theory of Humor (SSTH) proposed by Raskin (1985) and The General Theory of Verbal Humor (GTVH) proposed by Attardo and Raskin (1991) later are important theories to study humor. There are also abundant pragmatic throries that can be used to study humor, such as Austin’s Speech Act Theory (1962) and The Relevance Theory that Sperber and Wilson (1986) proposed. The research trend of humor has presented a pattern of multiple perspectives and layers. Verbal humor is regarded as the main form of humor, and is used most commonly in daily life. What’s more, verbal humor is the most important part of humor language. The application of verbal humor in daily life enables people to enlighten their thoughts, communicate their feelings and shorten their distance through laughter.

　Since Sperber and Wilson (1986) put forward Relevance Theory, it has be considered as a predominant theory of pragmatics to study language and has become a central issue in pragmatic research. So that, this thesis takes Relevance Theory as the basic theory to study language humor. Relevance Theory regards context as the ultimate reference and the whole theory of many variables in the theoretical system, based on which, the expression and understanding of verbal humor is also a dynamic cognitive process restricted by context. In order to make a successful communication, speakers have to make sure that they have the cognitive context in common even though the cognitive context will be changing all the time. Moreover, the origin of discourse sometimes is difficult for the sender and the receiver to have the same understanding of the context. This misunderstanding just adds to the humorous effect. Only by following the Relevance Theory and its context, can the most effective communication effect be achieved. The violation of the Relevance Theory and its context will lead to the emergence of conversational implicature. Therefore, verbal humor is a kind of uncooperative communicative behavior. This thesis takes the corpus from sitcoms, which was born in United State in the early 20 century.

　 5 Sitcoms is a kind of soap opera that is talking about the life, culture and customs of national. In addition, with the fast development of sitcoms, it has become more and more popular all around the world and is commonly be loved by audiences from different culture. 1.2 Objective and Significance of The Study Verbal humor is common in daily communication. In the course of a verbal conversation, speakers use puns, suspense and sarcasm words to promote the generation of humor. And in this way, the speakers that use those language techniques will make each other feel pleased, so it can be said that verbal humor plays a very important role in human communication. McGee believes that this form of communication must contain some kind of incongruity, illogicality, absurdity unexpected and ridiculous relationship (王勇, 2001). Only when the listener realizes the disharmony and reflects on and changes his assumptions to find harmony to achieve the best relevance, can the listener suitably interpret the humor. The sitcom is well suited for this study for its humorous language. This thesis will use Relevance Theory to analyse the humorous conversations between characters and then to reveal the techniques that used in the humorous conversations. As foreign sitcoms are rapidly developing, it has stood a large portion of the internet market and are naturally flood the screen. The characters and scenes in a comedy are relatively fixed, the plots based on everyday life are interesting, and the language is humorous, thus it becomes one of the favorite television program in American. The effect of humor in a comedy is mainly achieved by means of words, pronunciation, intonation, body movements, background music and other non-verbal factors. Verbal humor plays a very important part to generate humor, which is irreplaceable. The Big Bang Theory will be a well worth study object for it is one of the most popular entertainment TV programs in America. And from the perspective of pragmatics, this thesis uses Relevance Theory as the basic theory to study the humorous conversations in The Big Bang Theory, and analyze the phenomenon of verbal humor in the play. So that this thesis will help readers better understand and appreciate foreign sitcoms and the unique charm of language humor.

　2. Literature Review

　 2.1 Previous Study of The Big Bang Theory There are two distinguishable kinds of previous studies of humorous conversations implications in The Big Bang Theory, one is about the translation of English dialogues; the other is about the humorous utterance analysis. Pragmatics and semantics are two common ways of studying humor in linguistics. Some researches on The Big Bang Theory are found to be relative to the humorous translation, and for the second kind, the researches are from the perspectives of

　 6 Cooperative Principle, Speech Act Theory and the contrast between Cooperative Principle...