A Study of Verbal Humor in Modern Family from the Pragmatic Perspective 语用视角下的《摩登家庭》言语幽默研究文献综述

 2021-12-31 07:12

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文献综述

1.Introduction1.1 Research backgroundAs a distinctive and essential way of human communication, humor has long attracted attention of scholars from a variety of disciplines. In terms of humor, there are researches in physiology, aesthetics, linguistics, psychology and other fields in foreign countries, among which there are three influential humor theories proposed from the perspective of psychology: disharmony theory/congenial shock theory, release theory and superiority theory. Since the 1990s, the domestic research on humor has presented a multi-angle and multi-layered research trend, but it is inevitable that repeated research has appeared in the same period.Recently, language, as a natural carrier of humor, became the focus of humor study. However, it seems that exclusive study of language itself can not adequately explain how humor is produced and appreciated. Therefore, it is necessary to involve context in humor study and to carry out humor research from the perspective of pragmatics. In terms of pragmatics, most of the studies on humor in China have been conducted from the perspectives of foreboding, deixis, cooperative principle, relevance theory, and discourse. Among them, cooperative principle and relevance theory are the two pragmatic theories that have attracted much attention and applied most in humor studies. However, these two powerful theories have their own merits and limitations. Relevance Theory is more effective in analyzing rhetoric humor, while Cooperative Principle does a better job in explaining humor by speaking irrelevant utterance when the speakers are in bad moods. Therefore, the combination of these two theories provides the best framework for interpreting the cognitive process of humor understanding.The present thesis attempts to reveal the cognitive process of understanding humorous language by analyzing instances of humor in Modern Family, using Cooperative Principle and Relevance Theory as theoretical frameworks, and further, to compare the two theories in terms of their power and means in humor interpretation.1.2 Need for the studyHumor is a universal phenomenon. Not only does humor serves to ameliorate interpersonal relations, but also it enlivens the communicative atmosphere. For centuries, humor has aroused the interest of scholars, writers, comedians and average people owing to its ubiquity and popularity in social interaction. Over thousands of years, humor has been extensively studied in various fields, such as philosophy, aesthetics, anthropology, sociology and psychology. Despite a long history of humor practice and all of the efforts devoted to humor research, it is yet not safe to conclude that we had a panoramic and clear picture of humor. This study, by analyzing the generation of humor in Modern Family based on Cooperative Principle and Relevance Theory, hopes to offer a better understanding of humor in sitcoms and then humor itself from the perspective of pragmatics.The research of this paper has the following two significance. First, through the analysis and comparison of humorous language from two perspectives, it enables people to have a multi-angle analysis of the psychological reasoning process of verbal humor, and also makes people have a deep thinking on both theories and humor. Second, through analysis and comparison, the advantages and disadvantages of the two theories are found, proving that no one theory is omnipotent. Therefore, theories can learn from each other to make up for each other's shortcomings, which is also conducive to better analysis of various linguistic phenomena.1.3 Research purposesFirst of all, studies having been conducted on humor are limited to narrative texts and some canned jokes, which unfortunately could not afford the sufficient foundation for the study of how individuals (in this paper, the American native English speakers) utilize verbal humor to achieve communicative goal. Given that this study mainly focuses on the spoken language with humorous effect used in dialogues, it hopes, more or less, to extend the range of the study. In the second place, it is two theories concerning the studies of humor, to be specific, the Cooperative Principle and the Relevance Theory that this research paper would concentrate on to make analysis on verbal humor, therefore, this research paper is expected to make a better exposition of verbal humor through comparison. Lastly, this research paper might offer some valuable information for language learning and teaching, meanwhile it may also help to arouse the interest of the second language learners and stimulate their learning motivation.2.Literature Review2.1The development of sitcom and the introduction to Modern FamilySituation comedy, shortened to sitcom, is one of the most endurable and basic genres of TV programming in the US. Since the first aired sitcom Mary kay and Johnny, it has flourished for more than half a century and remained a weekly prime-time program. This format of television entertainment originated from radio in the 1920s. It was later transformed to television broadcast and today it is found almost exclusively on TV with a regular cast and set in a regular location, which is usually a household or a workplace. As to its production method, sitcom has more in common with theatre than film. Whole scenes are performed in continuous takes in front of the audience. Actors have to make entrance and exit just as they do in the theatre. They also have to be in connection with the audience while delivering their performances, just as they might on stage. Its similarity with theatre even extends into the dramatic structure.Sitcom is also familiar to Chinese audience. In the early 1990s, Growing pains was introduced for the first time into China from the US. Ever since then, sitcom has become popular in China. On November, 5th, 1992, director Ying Da and writer Wang Shuo started to discuss about the production of I Love My Family. That same day has been identified as the birth date of sitcom in mainland, China. Up till now, many Chinese sitcoms have been produced and put on the screen, such as Busybody Sister Ma, Story of a Kitchen Squad, Foreign Wife and Local Husband, A Family form Northeast China and so on, gaining a large number of fans.American situation comedy has been very popular among Chinese audience such as the well-known Friends, Big Bang Theory, 2 Broke Girls, Modern Family, and Growing Pains. Modern Family is relatively new among them. It has 11 seasons so far. Modern Family, with the Jason Winer as the director, Cristopher Lloyd and Steven Levitan as the screenwriter, is debuted on ABC since September 23, 2009. Modern Family is one of the most successful and influential sitcoms among American drama. It gives an account of the stories happened in three related American families, the dribs and drabs of whose lives are recorded by an invisible camera carrying man. This sitcom adopts the pseudo documentary as the shooting form and most of the lenses are made by a holding camera. Beginning from a special angle of view, Modern Family presents audience the common but complex daily life and their emotional world of the American family. From this sitcom, we can not only see various aspects of the American society, including their social values, education, occupations, etc., getting a comprehensive understanding of the American life and their culture, but also get some inspirations from their outlook of daily life and then to think about our own lives. Most importantly, audiences are enjoying it in laughter from actors and actresses humorous conversations. Modern Family has won five Emmy awards from the 62nd to 66th session for best comedy class drama; at the 62nd session of America Emmy Award, it got a total of 14 Emmy nominations. All these awards are definitely the evidence of how successful and popular it is.2.2 Previous studies on humor2.2.1 Humor studies abroadStudies on humor can be traced back to the time of Plato and Aristotle. (Chu, 2008). Since then, many foreign scholars have studied humor from different perspectives, and many theories about the humor generation have been formulated through ages. The author will introduce some most famous theories about humor generation and interpretation by trying to summarize foreign studies of humor form various perspectives.From the perspective of psychology, there are three traditional humor theories, namely, the superiority theory, the release theory and the incongruity theory. The superiority theory is traceable to Plato and Aristotle and developed classically in Hobbes (Palmer, 1994:94). This theory holds that to laugh at others can make people feel superior. This theory has won great attention, especially in sociolinguistics for it stress on interpersonal and social aspect of humor. However, it fails to explain all kinds of humor simply because of the fact that not all feelings of superiority may lead to humor. For example, people do not find it humorous when they feel really sorry for others misfortunes or sufferings. Thus the theories still lacks the power of explanation. The release theory is related to Sigmund Freud. This theory considers humor as an outlet for nervousness and physical energy as well as a way to rebel against constraints of daily life. Incongruity theory is another theory about humor explanation to which Kant has contributed a lot. He (as cited in Xiang, 2008:85) claims that laughter is an affection arising from the sudden transformation of a strained expectation in nothing. Kant believes that the cause of laughter in every case is simply the sudden perception of the incongruity between a concept and the real objects, and the laugh itself is just an expression of this incongruity. (as cited in Liu, 2008:6) Under this framework, humor involves some kind of difference between what one receives and what one expects.Form the perspective of linguistics, the two most influential linguistic humor theories are Semantic Script Theory of Humor (SSTH) and General Theory of Verbal Humor (GTVH). SSTH is based on the key notion of script originating from psychology. The script is depicted as a large chunk of information surrounding the word or evoked by it of a cognitive structure internalized by the native speaker and it represents the native speakers knowledge of a small part of the world (Raskin, 1985:81). The main supposition of SSTH goes like this: a text can be described as a single-joke-carrying one as long as it satisfies both of the following two conditions. One condition requires that the text is fully or partly compatible with two different scripts. Another condition is that the two scripts are said to fully or partly overlap in this text (Raskin, 1985). Under these two conditions, humor can be generated because of script oppositions. As Raskin states, the goal is to formulate in purely semantic terms the necessary and sufficient conditions for a text to be funny (as cited in Fang, 2010). It pays no attention to other parameters that contribute to the funniness of a joke text with the assumption that script opposition is the most important one. GTVH is the outcome of Arttardo and Raskins collaboration. It postulates, in addition to script opposition (SO), five other parameters, namely, logical mechanism (LM), situation (SI), target (TA), narrative strategy (NS) and language (LA). Altogether, the six parameters are termed as knowledge resources (KRs). With SO and the other five resources on a descending order in accordance with their abstractness, the six KRs form a hierarchical order. Each KR is a list or a set of lists from which the joke teller makes choices for use in the joke (as cited in Fang, 2010). Above reviewed are two influential linguistic theories of humor. Each theory has a different focus. However they are both based on linguistics, and more significantly, developed solely for accounting for humor.From the perspective of pragmatics, there are many theories that have a great power to explain humor. Among them are Speech Act Theory (SAT), Cooperative Principle (CP), Politeness Principle (PP) and Relevance Theory (RT). Here the author wants to briefly introduce the SAT and PP as the other two theories will be carefully explained in the Methodology part. SAT originates with the British philosopher John Austin in late 1950s, and it is considered as the first major theory in pragmatics. Another researcher worth mentioning is John. R. Searle, an American who also contributes a lot to the theory. They hold that language is not used to inform of describe things only. Rather, it is often used to do things and perform acts. In other words, utterances are actions. Based on this, humorous effect is often achieved because of the failure in the conveyance of the illocutionary. Leech (1983) formulates PP, which is believed to explain why people tend to use indirect way of saying things. Six maxims are included in this principle, namely, tact maxim (minimize cost to other; maximize benefit to other), generosity maxim (minimize benefit to self; maximize cost to self), approbation maxim (minimize dispraise of other; maximize praise of other), modesty maxim (minimize praise of self; maximize dispraise of self), agreement maxim (minimize disagreement between self and other; maximize agreement between self and other ) and sympathy maxim (minimize antipathy between self and other; maximize sympathy between self and other) ( Leech,1983). In short, Politeness Principle requires us to adopt strategies of minimizing impolite beliefs and maximizing polite beliefs. PP can best explain the humorous effect achieved when the speaker is trying to avoid offence. These pragmatic theories are of great value in explaining humor as all humor has a pragmatic component (Attardo, 2003).Above reviewed are some significant theories about humor explanation from different perspectives. They all have their indispensable merits, as well as undeniable shortcomings. Thus, the study of these theories is of necessity in interpreting humor. Moreover, throughout the learning process, we should also make a comparison between different theories, so that we can take the essence and discard the dregs.2.2.2 Humor studies in ChinaIn 1980s, Humor Linguistics by Hu，known as the first work in linguistics that studies verbal humor systematically, was published. From then on, humor research has become a focus for many Chinese scholars. They study verbal humor from various perspectives such as linguistics, pragmatics, rhetoric and so on. The author tries to summarize their studies on verbal humor in the following paragraphs.From the perspective of linguistics, Wu (1999) summarizes the use of lexical elements to form humorous speech by means of derangement, word disintegration, small use of big words, and scalar generalization, almost all of which depended on the variation and application of words. Besides, Wu (2000) discusses the formation mechanism of phonetic elements and humorous speech. Wang (2002) used Russian language as corpus to demonstrate the relationship between the generation of humor and violation of cooperative principles, and the formation of humor depends on the clever use of grammar, vocabulary, rhetoric and other skills. Zhao and Li (2003) analyze the ambiguity in English humor on three levels: phonology, grammar and vocabulary.From the perspective of psychological cognition, Nan (1999) generalizes the characteristics of coversational humor in common.Wang and Lin (2003) argue that humor interpretation depends not only on the correlation and reasoning, but also on the integration of concept and the new structure. They think that the combination of RT and CB complementary can better explain humor, and thus a good model for cognitive pragmatics is put forward.From the semantic aspect, Wang and Run (2004) have studied humorous language in On the Pragmatic Semantic Characteristics of Humor Discourse, illustrating humor in Russian discourse with examples, and holding that humorous discourse has such pragmatic semantic characteristics as implicature, combinational, emotional evaluation, nationality and fuzziness. Qiu (2006) discusses the semantic function of verbal humor from the perspective of relevance theory and spatial compound theory, and believes that the combination of the two theories can better explain the semantic analysis process of humor. Du (2007) believes that humor is an important part of English and a feature of British and American culture, and ambiguity is a common means to produce humor. He exemplifies the humor generated by rhetorical devices such as metaphor, irony and pun with examples.From the perspective of pragmatics, Liu (1987) studies the generation of English humor from the perspective of the violation of the principles of the Cooperative Principle. Lv (1988) analyzes verbal humor from the Cooperative principle, conversational implicature, presupposition, deixis and speech act respectively. He deems that the interpretation of the humor, on the one hand, cannot leave the inherent law of language itself. On the other hand, it also depends on the usage of language in context to a large extent. Chen (1999) analyzes the linguistic phenomenon of conversational humor and the application of conversational implicature theory in the understanding of English humor.She then compares the pragmatic interpretation of humor by Artado and Raskin's model of insincerity communication. Li(2002) analyzes verbal humor from the perspectives of premise, cooperative principles and conversational implicature. Meng (2002) discusses humorous speech from the perspectives of deixis, cooperative principle, premise, speech act and relevance theory, and analyzes the basic laws of pragmatics and humor. Zhang (2002) discusses the analysis of English humor from three aspects: pragmatic failure, pragmatic reasoning and cross-cultural pragmatics. Zhang(2006) analyzes humorous utterances from the basic theories of pragmatics, such as deixis, presupposition, speech act, conversation implicature, politeness principle and relevance theory, and explores the relationship between pragmatic rules and humor. Most of these scholars' studies are supported by pragmatic theories, such as cooperative principle, premise, conversational implicature and relevance theory, to analyze and discuss the pragmatic mechanism of humor production.From what has been summarized above, we can see that the research on humor has made great progress in its breadth and depth. However, we can also find that the phenomenon of repeated research has appeared in the same period. Moreover, until recently, the case study on humor is still not enough, and few of them use oral English as their corpus. Aside from that, although studies on verbal humor from the perspective of pragmatics are increasing with time, few of them make a combination of RT theory and CP principle. The author of the study aims to fill the gap and do more thorough research to find out how humorous effect is achieved by words in Modern Family.ReferencesApte, M. L. (1985). Humor and Laughter: An Anthropological Approach. London:Cornell University Press.Attardo, S. (1993). Violation of Conversational Maxims and Cooperation: The case ofjokes. Journal of Pragmatics, 19, 537-558.Attardo, S. (1993). Linguistic Theories of Humor. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Attardo, S. (1997). The semantic foundations of cognitive theories of humor. Humor: International Journal of Humor Research,10:395-420.Attardo. S. (2003). Introduction: The pragmatics of humor. Journal of Pragmatics, 35, 1287-1294.Berger, A. A. (1993). An Anatomy of Humor. London: Transaction Publishers.Freud, S. (1976). Jokes and Their Relation to Unconscious. London: Penguin Books.Gruner, J. (1989). Humor and Social Change in Twentieth-Centuary America. Boston:Trustees of the Public Library of the City of Boston.Halliday, M. A. K., R. Hasan. (1989). Language, Context, and Text: Aspects of language in a social semiotic perspective. Oxford: OUP．Holland, N. N. L. (1982). A Psychology of Humour. London: Cornell University Press Ltd.Martin, R. (1998). Approaches to the Sense of Humor: A Historical Review. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Nash, W. (1985). The Language of Humor. New York: Longman Group Ltd..Nash, W. (1993). The Language of Humor. New York: Longman Group Limited.Norrick, N. R. (1993). Conversational Joking: Humor in Everyday Talk. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Norrick, N. R. (2003). Issues in conversational joking. Journal of Pragmatics,35:1333-1359.Palmer, J. (1994). Taking Humor Seriously. NY: Routledge.Parkin, J. (1997). Humour Theorists of The Twentieth Century. New York: The EdwinMellen Press.Raskin, V. (1985). 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