Friends from Principle View

Chapter One

Introduction

1.1 The significance of the study

For a rather long time, the use of humor in language is a topic under hot discussion by the experts of psychology, philosophy and linguistics. Due to its complexity, popularity and research ability, studies on humor are carried out from many different angles and many prominent theories are applied to analyze this language phenomenon, such as Relevance Theory, Cooperative Principle, Politeness Principle, figure of speech, etc. Verbal humor is a common occurrence in the daily life, which had brought forward many lively and witty colors for us in our study, work and life. In addition to bringing us pleasure and fun, the communicative functions of humor cannot be ignored. It makes contribution to facilitate human relationships and motivate people to take a positive attitude towards life. So it is worthwhile to conduct the research on humor from pragmatic perspective.

This thesis restricts our attention to verbal humor which can be seen in everyday communication. The author analyzes humor from two most prominent perspectives in pragmatics. Cooperative Principle (abbreviated: CP) mainly offers some maxims to regulate people’s behavior in using language, while Context is the “environment”, “circumstances” in which language is used. By focusing on a particular and typical type of communication, the author hopes that this study can make the understanding of humor clearer and those pragmatic theories more specific.

1.2 Methods of the research

As far as the methodology is concerned, the author mainly applies and adopts explorative research method, that is, qualitative research or the combination of quantitative research and qualitative research. Via quantities of examples analysis, the author summarizes the universal conclusion and makes an explicit explanation and illustration for the pragmatic use in Friends.

Due to the suitability of the show itself and personal fascination about the...