浅析老友记幽默语言的语用对比

张瑞波

摘 要：作為幽默的主要表现形式，幽默语言在我们的生活中很常见。本论文基于国内外目前研究的基础上，以合作原则、礼貌原则、语境理论为理论框架，以美国情景喜剧《老友记》为分析样本，对其中的幽默会话的生成与理解进行对比分析，旨在从中发现中英文幽默在交际过程中生成与理解中的异同，以及中英文幽默映射出的语言与文化差异。

本论文具有一定的理论意义及实践意义。其理论意义是，第一，论文对情景喜剧《老友记》中出现的幽默进行了较为细致的分析，进一步验证并发展了语用理论框架下关于幽默的制笑机制，并一定程度上从语用学角度丰富了幽默以及情景喜剧的有关理论；第二，本论文尝试采用对比分析的理论与方法阐释情景喜剧《老友记》中英剧本中幽默效果的产生于理解，从而丰富了对比分析理论的应用。

Abstract:Humorous language, as the main form to express humor, is popular in our daily life. It comes from our daily life while to some degree it goes beyond life reality. In various books and articles on pragmatics, humorous conversations are frequently taken as examples for pragmatic analysis and studies. Thus the close relationship between humor and pragmatics seems evident.

This study on humor in sitcom friend has theoretical significance. Theoretically, although the pragmatic approach to the explanation of the mechanism of humor production and appreciation has been proposed for a few years, this generalized theoretical explanation of the mechanism of humor is seldom utilized in the analysis of a specific humor context and has seldom been testified.

关键词：幽默，对比分析，情景喜剧，《老友记》

Key words: Humor, Contrastive Analysis, Sitcom, Friends

[中图分类号]：H03 [文献标识码]：A[文章编号]：1002-2139(2011)-16-0135-03

Introduction

Humor is as universal as language. It is so common that it indwells in every nation, every race, every culture and every field of human being. Wherever there is human race there exists humor.

As a language phenomenon, humor is pervasive in literature, in movies, on television, in our life, etc. As a special kind of human communication, humor is always the most welcomed one. Humor ameliorates human relations, improves the communicative atmosphere, and brings happiness and pleasant feeling to a person in depression. It is regarded as a powerful weapon against hardship and misfortune. Actually, humor is the way to a happy and colorful life.

Situation comedy belongs to the verbal-visual model of communication and the humor in it is brought out both through verbal and non-verbal humorous strategies. As a kind of TV program, sitcom, especially American sitcom has become so popular throughout the world, among which Friend is a typical example. Until now, the linguistic researches on humor in sitcom are still limited within the field of discourse analysis, foreign language teaching, and cross-cultural study, etc. This study attempts to explore the contrastive analysis of humor from the perspective of pragmatics.

1.Literature Review

Humor is a very pervasive phenomenon in our daily life. Thus , the field of humor research has been capturing the interest of many scholars from different fields.

1.1. A Review of Previous Studies on Humor

What is humor? We all can think of examples of humor, and we all can realize the humor when we experience it. These issues have fascinated many scholars from different fields, who have produced a diverse literture on humor. As far as linguistically oriented studies of humor are concerned, conversational humor or joking in everyday talk is increasingly receiving attention. Norrick (1993:139-164) reviews the past linguistically oriented researches concerning humor in interaction and about joking and laughter in conversational analysis in the bibliographical essay. Raskin (1998) once wrote: while dealing primarily with examples of verbal humor.

To address the 'pragmatic' component in his theory, Raskin(1985) observed that jokes seem to violate Grice maxim. But Raskin noted that jokes seem to follow a different set of maxims--that is. In recent years, there have appeared many more articles based on the field research aiming at the analysis of the social functions of humor in conversations.

2.A Review of Contrastive Studies

Contrastive linguistics has been in its booming period since the 1960s, with more and more new perspectives studying its effects. With the combination of contrastive linguistics and discourse analysis, there is a relatively new branch--contrastive discourse analysis, which has drawn the attention of more and more linguistics in recent decades. Initially, the term"contrastive linguistics" was put forward by the American linguist B.L.Whorf in 1941 saying, "Much progress has been made in classifying the languages of the each into genetic families, each having descent from a single precursor, and in tracing such developments through time. The result is called ' comparative linguistics '. Then in 1957, contrastive linguistics was finally established with the publication of Robert Lado's Linguistics across Cultures: applied linguistics for language teachers. Over the past 40 years many new perspectives have been introduced this study during its development.

3.A Review of Previous Studies on Situation Comedy

As for the researches on situation comedy, until recently, most of them are still limited in the field of art. That is because it is first of all a form of art. It belongs to the field of art. But this kind of art includes a very crucial fragment that it cannot live without. No sitcom can be acted out without dialogues or conversations. And these dialogues and conversations are the embodiment of humor.

3.1. Language Features of Friends

1）dynamic American Oral English

The television characters' use of language generally mirrors or even sets the trend of language the most popular use in the real. For 10 years, Friends has always garnered American oral English: the innovative sentence structure, the new words and phrases, the expression, etc. A study conducted by University of Toronto researchers reveals that the language of Friends is always in the vanguard of new changes in American English.

2）As a sitcom, Friends owes its great success to an indispensable ingredient: its amiable, friendly, ingenious humor.

It is well known that humor often varies by locality and does not easily transfer from one culture to another. This happens because humor often relies on a cultural context, and many humors and dramatic effects in Friends do pose great challenges for the translator. However, humor, in its nature, is a form of entertainment and a form of human communication intended to make people laugh and feel happy.

3.2. Special Features of Humor in Friends

The humor in Friends revolves in one way or another around concerns of American people at the six friends' age: their concepts, catchphrases, and ideology;their post-college life, or echoes of student years; their concepts, catchphrases, and ideology;their post-college life, or echoes of student years; their attitudes toward work or the state of joblessness. In order to ensure the success of this long-running laugh fest, the screenwriters employed various techniques to deliver humor. These techniques include: irony, for example, in most of Chandler's lines; wordplay such as oxymoron, puns, etc. ; wit, as in many one-liner jokes; non-sequitur; sarcasm; parody; ridiculous gestures and movement; adages, often in the form of "law" of nature; deliberate ambiguity and confusion with reality; unexpected outcome, such as a witty punchline (surprise); absurdity; humorous self-invented "law"; self-inflicted embarrassing situation. Losing one's swimming trunks after a dive; comic sounds or inherently funny words with certain sound that make them amusing in a particular language; paraprosdokian (a figure of speech that uses an unexpective of pragmatics, humors in Friends are realized by violating some conversational principles, such as Cooperative Principle, Politeness Principle etc. So the pragmatic theories can explain the humorous phenomena in Friends.

There are both linguistic and visual codes and symbols in Friends that the American audience will immediately recognize. Much of the humor in this sitcom relies on the recognizability of the language used by its characters, on the associations it raises in its audience.

4.Summary

To sum up, it is evident that the comparison or contrastive research on the humor in English sitcom and its Chinese version within the framework of pragmatics is relatively rare. Thus, the previous studies and related researches give the author great inspiration in selecting the present subject for further study.

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