关联理论视角下情景喜剧的言语幽默之语言学研究

Chapter One Introduction

1.1 Rationale of the Research
Nash (1985) states that humor is a distinctive characteristic of humanity and it isa kind of unique capability and communicative form of human beings. Being afamiliar form, humor pervasively exists in people’s daily life and demonstrates itsvarious functions. It helps people release negative emotions and pressure to makethem feel pleasant. It also provides a relaxing atmosphere for people, which isbeneficial to their physical health. Moreover, humor shortens the distance amongpeople and promote the harmonious interpersonal relationship and so forth. With thepowerful validity closely related to the human nature, humor has become a hotresearch topic, which can be traced back to Plato and Aristotle in the time of ancientGreek. Meanwhile, humor has also been an interdisciplinary research topic, whicharouses scholars’ interest from multiple disciplines, such as philosophy, psychology,sociolinguistics, anthropology, linguistics and so on.
Humor can be classified into various categories according to different standards,but the current thesis emphasizes verbal humor that is well exhibited in theconversations within situation comedies (sitcoms). The sitcom is a kind of languageart, in which humorous utterances unfold with the development of plots. As one of thecarriers of verbal humor, the sitcom has gained great popularity because of theirrelaxing, witty and humorous language style. In order to better appreciate the natureof verbal humor in sitcoms, linguists have paid much attention to analyzing the verbalhumor in sitcoms from different fields, such as pragmatics, systemic-functionallinguistics and cognitive linguistics, and they have made great contribution to humorinvestigation.
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1.2 Objectives and Significance of the Research
1.2.1 Objectives of the Research
With the guidance of relevance theory, the objective of the research is to explorethe production and interpretation of verbal humor by a detailed analysis of humorousconversations in the sitcom Good Luck Charlie. The main aim of this thesis is toanswer the following questions:
1. How does the verbal humor emerge in sitcom Good Luck Charlie? And arethere any techniques adopted to produce verbal humor in the sitcom?
2. In the light of RT, does the general procedure of verbal humor interpretationhave the power in interpreting humorous utterances in Good Luck Charlie?3. Are there any illocutionary acts of humorous utterances in Good Luck Charlie?
If there are, what are the main kinds of them?
In a sum, the thesis by addressing the three questions hopes to offer a thoroughanalysis of verbal humor in sitcom Good Luck Charlie, and further, to betterappreciate the nature of verbal humor from a cognitive perspective.
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Chapter Two Literature Review

2.1 An Overview of Studies on Humor
2.1.1 Definitions of Humor
As a unique characteristic of human beings, humor plays an indispensable rolein relieving pressure and promoting harmonious interpersonal relationship. With theperse functions of humor, scholars from different fields of psychology, aesthetics,sociology and linguistics have devoted themselves to researching on humor forcenturies. However, when it refers to the concept of humor, there is no satisfactoryand convincing definition given till now because of its interdisciplinary andcomplicated nature. Therefore, it is necessary to review the definition of humor indetail.
The English word “humor” comes from Latin and is a medical term originally,which means “body fluid” or “liquid”. The famous doctor Hippocrates in ancientGreece puts forward the fluid theory which argues that there are four kinds of fluids inhuman body, namely blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile (Liu Naishi & ZhangRenxian, 2016). It is believed that these four fluids play an essential role in keepinghealthy. If the fluids take appropriate proportions in body, people will be in goodhealth condition, but once the proportion is out of balance, people are prone to be sick.Later, another noted Greek doctor Galen develops and contributes much to the fluidtheory (Liu Naishi & Zhang Renxian, 2016). He is one of the pioneers to connect thesecretion of body fluid to people’s characters or deposition. For instance, the“sanguine” person, resulted from over secretion of blood, tends to be positive andoptimistic. It is because of the close relation between the fluid and temperament that“humor” loses its original medical meaning gradually and begins to refer to charactersor deposition. With the development, the word “humor” puts its emphasis on thespecific deposition or temperament that means jocular, funny or absurd.
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2.2 Previous Studies on Sitcom Good Luck Charlie
In order to have a thorough and deep interpretation of humor in this thesis, it isindispensable to review previous researches on the sitcom Good Luck Charlie.
As a successful family-centered American sitcom in recent years, Good LuckCharlie has gained great popularity and appealed to audience all over the world.Meanwhile, providing abundant humorous utterances, this sitcom has drawn manyscholars’ attention to investigate the verbal humor in it from a variety of perspectives.
Zhang Aixia (2011) from Southwest University investigates verbal humor inGood Luck Charlie from the perspective of CBT. Introducing the four spaces of CBT,including cross-space mapping, generic space, blending and emergent structurerespectively, she gives a detailed account of the verbal humor from the fourtaxonomies of integration network, namely simplex network, mirror network,single-scope networks and double-scope works. She finds that the three componentprocesses of blending that consists of composition, completion and elaboration, workconsistently in the interpretation and appreciation of humorous utterances in thesitcom.
Taking politeness theory and conversational theory as framework, Zhang Jianmin(2014) attempts to conduct research on the conversational implicature in Good LuckCharlie. She elaborates on the politeness principles, face saving theory, facethreatening acts (FTAs) and politeness strategies for doing FTAs. She maintains thatthe characters in the sitcom often violate maxims of CP by employing politenessstrategies in order to reduce the face threatening of the hearer and eventually achievetheir communicative intention. From her point of view, politeness is the main reasonwhy people violate CP.
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Chapter Three Theoretical Framework............................... 27
3.1 Relevance Theory......................................27
3.1.1 Ostensive-inferential Communication Model....................................... 27
3.1.2 Cognitive Context................................29
Chapter Four Relevance-based Interpretation of Verbal Humor in Good LuckCharlie....................................39
4.1 Overall Results of Data Collection................................39
4.2 Relevance-based Procedure in Interpreting Lexical Humor........................... 41
Chapter Five Conclusion............................................... 71
5.1 Major Findings of the Present Study................................71
5.2 Limitations of the Present Study.......................................... 73

Chapter Four Relevance-based Interpretation of VerbalHumor in Good Luck Charlie

4.1 Overall Results of Data Collection
As it is mentioned in Chapter Two, humor is a broad and general concept withdifferent classifications based on various criteria. It is not difficult to notice that manynon-verbal factors in sitcoms including the participant’s facial expressions, intonationand manners, may result in humorous utterances. However, the thesis ignores thesenon-verbal factors and just focuses on verbal humor which belongs to linguistic formembodied by the humorous utterances of the participants.
From the general procedure of interpreting verbal humor mentioned above, it isrealized that the contrast between the optimal relevance and the maximal relevancemainly results in humorous effects. Moreover, it is known that humorists with thepurpose of creating humor, will predict and manipulate the cognitive tendency of thehearer. They tend to produce a stimulus deliberately, which attracts the hearer’sattention and guides the hearer to an interpretation that is always not the intended one.Thus the speaker is likely to adopt a series of strategies to express his communicativeintention indirectly and promote the occurrence of humorous effects.
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Chapter Five Conclusion

5.1 Major Findings of the Present Study

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