An Analysis of Cooperative Principles and Humorous Effects in Friends.doc

an analysis of cooperative principles and humorous effects in friendscontents中文摘要iabstractiiacknowledgements.iiiintroduction.3i. an introduction of friends and humor.4 a. a brief introduction to friends.4b. a brief introduction to humor.5.ii. an analysis of friends depends on the maxim of quantity.8a. make your contribution as informative as required.8b. do not make your contribution more informative as required.9iii. an analysis of friends depends on the maxim of quality11 a. do not say what you believe to be false.11 b. do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.14iv. an analysis of friends depends on the maxim of relation.15v. an analysis of friends depends on the maxim of manner.17a. avoid ambiguity .17b. avoid obscurity of expression.18conclusions.20notes.21bibliography.22introductionhumor is a very intriguing and fascinating phenomenon of human society, which is multidimensional, complex and all pervasive. therefore, many scholars and experts at all times and in all over the world have done profound research on humor.the significant functions of humor have aroused the interest of many scholars. about 2,000 years ago, people began the research on humor. however, the study of humor is not a simple task for the reason that it is an interdisciplinary science drawing upon a wide range of academic disciplines including biology, psychology, sociology, philosophy, geography, history, linguistics, literature, education, family science, and film studies and so on. moreover, there are different reasons and purposes for humor. one may wish to be sociable, cope better, seem clever, solve problems, make a critical point, enhance therapy, or express something one could not otherwise express by means of humor.within the 20th century, linguistics has developed greatly in almost every area of the discipline from sounds, words and sentences to meaning and texts. meanwhile, linguistic studies on humor have also extended considerably to social, cultural, and pragmatic concerns. one of the most noticeable achievements in linguistics over the past few decades is the development of pragmatics. it is not long before scholars apply pragmatics into humor analysis. the purpose of this thesis is to exploit the mechanisms of the generation and perception of humor from the pragmatics perspective. it is carried out with the help of the application of cooperative principles and its maxims; furthermore, the author also wants to probe into the obstacles which prohibit the english learners from understanding and appreciating the humorous utterances in friends as well as in daily life. furthermore, the author wants to discuss the possibility and effects of using humor in english teaching classes.the significance of the study, first of all, for people who are interested in humor and pragmatics or studying this topic, this thesis may be able to help them as a means of reference to study about english humor as well as its relation with the function of speech. moreover, it is very interesting to study comedy film-sitcom, since it can give different points of view in studying language. what the author means is that mostly people observe the phenomena of language in serious or ordinary situation but in comedic situation, there is a different set of situation where people sometimes may act uncooperatively or impolitely to achieve the humorous scene. this kind of scene may look awkward and unusual, but it can also happen sometimes in real life, whether the people realize it or not. the author also thinks it would be very interesting to know the way in which humor is generated from the linguistic point of view. and the humorous teaching approach would make a contribution to the students of english learning by improving classroom atmosphere, reducing class tension and increasing the rapport between students and teacher.i. an introduction of friends and humor a.a brief introduction to friendsfriend is a world famous american sitcom telling of the stories of six good friends and their respective private lives. the story takes place in manhattan, new york. it presents most aspects of american society, for example, morality, social values, family values, sex values, religion, government, institution, education, occupation, etc. and introduces people of all walks to the audiences, from cooks to professors, from blue collars to white collars. and the most important feature for the sitcom is its humorous dialogues among the characters. the sitcom friends has six protagonists who recur in the sitcom all the way. what follows is a general introduction to them with the purpose to do better analysis on the humor in the sitcom.rachel green, she runs away half an hour before her wedding and goes to monica for shelter after the run away. monica is her best friend in high school and monicas brother has one-sided love for rachel for many years. besides, their families are old family friends .in order to be independent from her family, rachel gets her first job as a waitress at the caf named central perk ,which they visit frequently .later rachel gets the appropriate job for her as an assistant buyer at bloomingdales and ralph lauren for she has an exquisite taste for fashion. rachels sense of humor has a childish flavor and that makes her very lovely.monica geller, rosss younger sister, is a chef in the sitcom, who is often contrasted with his anthropologist brother by her boastful and overcritical parents. she is obese in her childhood and youth hood, which becomes the target of jokes to her friends. she always strives for perfection in everything ranging from house-cleaning, food-cooking to wedding arrangement. so her sense of humor has a bit flavor of crankiness. phoebe buffay is a masseuse and an amateur in music and the lyrics she writes have always been performed in the same melody. usually phoebes behavior is a little bit eccentric and weird. but in my opinion, she is the most strong-willed and optimistic figure in this sitcom. she has a bitter childhood as her parents divorced when she was very young and she has to make a living by herself at the age of 14.in this situation, she doesnt lose her passion for life, her goodness and her sense of humor, which is commendable and estimable.joey tribbiani at first a minor actor and later becomes a famous one for his role in the sitcom days of our lives as dr. drake ramoray. moreover, he is a playboy with many girlfriends and a food lover. his sense of humor goes to the category of innocence and naivet.chandler bing is an expert in data analysis for a large multi-national corporation. he has incurable mental hurt because of his parents divorce and so his sense of humor is very sarcastic and ironic.ross geller, monicas elder brother, is an anthropologist who first works at a museum of prehistoric history and then a professor at new york university. at the very beginning of this sitcom he divorces with his lesbian wife and he is loyal to his love for rachel. generally speaking, his sense of humor is pedantic and scholastic.as a result, the american sitcom friends embodies ample and miscellaneous humorous utterances which provide authentic material for us on humor research. in the following the author will take a lot of the examples selected for friends to make a research on humor from the angle of pragmatics.b.a brief introduction to humorin oxford advanced learners english-chinese dictionary, the notion of humor is the quality in something that makes it funny or amusing; or the ability to laugh at things that are amusing. humor1 is a central part of all cultures, languages, idiolects, and most registers of speech. and not only is humor a pervasive phenomenon fulfilling vital roles in all kinds of human communication, it also forms a quantitatively relevant part of it. this centrality of humor, both as a means and as an end of human interchange, is widely accepted.humor is almost everywhere. we can find humor in our conversations, in the movies, on televisions, in books, newspapers and magazines, on the radios, etc. there is nowhere that has not been filled with humor and there is no field, whether it is sex, marriage, politics, religion, work, and family-any field you name it-that has not been ridiculed as humorous expressions. few words may have as many positive and pleasant connotations as the word humor does. humor carries with it connotations like light-hearted, amusing, optimistic, enjoyable, relieving, intelligent, witty and funny, to list only a few. correspondingly, a sense of humor is a highly desirable trait to possess for human beings.a preparatory step has to be made for further discussion that is what the definition of humor is. to some extent, it is impossible to give a cogent definition that is valid everywhere since humor research draws upon a wide range of academic disciplines. it is the activity of the brains, the emotion inside us, the smile appearing on the face, etc. as a result, we might as well discuss the humor definition from different perspectives.walter nash considers that “the humor of psychological and social satire is expressed to a very great extent through the flaws and missed connections of speech acts, the contractual failures of parties to conversation”. he points out humorous conversations occur because “those exchanges violate the maxims of ordinary conversation, as formulated in a well-known paper by h. p. grice”. and then he explains his idea: “the work of grice, of austin, and of j. r. searle, puts into theoretical terms what we already know intuitively about conversation, i.e. that it is a contract involving the agreed conduct of various acts of assertion, direction, performance, verdict-giving, promising, inviting, requesting, etc. when the contract is broken, whether innocently or designedly, the effect may be funny; may illuminate a character or situation; or may designate some critical defect in a relationship”.chinese professor mao ronggui studies humor from linguistic view. he divides humorous language into two types: rhetorical humor and non-rhetorical humor. according to the study of professor mao , the rhetorical humor is produced through using various tropes, including oxymoron, transferred epithet, syllepsis, zeugma, anticlimax, pun, irony, parody, paradox, and the non-rhetorical humor is created by lexical deviation and deviation of register. besides, many scholars in china have done researches on humor based on pragmatic theories, such as h. p. grices cooperative principle (cp), leechs politeness principle (pp), sperber & wilsons relevance theory (rt), diesis, and presupposition, etc. in accordance with their researches, humorous conversations are always produced by flouting the cp or rt, violating the pp, or using obscure diesis or improper presupposition. however, the studies in this field have not reached the stage of maturity, and they are rather insufficient or lack of authority in china, let alone the pragmatic studies on the humorous conversations in american sitcoms friends since it just came into being in the 1990s.in the following, we are talk about the cooperative principle and humor.grice once said, “i wish to represent a certain subclass of nonconventioanal implicatures, which i shall call conversational implicatures, as being essentially connected with certain general features of discourseour talk exchanges do not normally consist of a succession of disconnected remarks, and would not be rational if they did. they are characteristically, to some degree at least, cooperative efforts; and each participant recognizes in them, to some extent, a common purpose or set of purposes, or at least a mutually accepted direction. this purpose or direction may be fixed from the start, or it may evolve during the exchange; it may be fairly definite, or it may be so indefinite as to leave very considerable latitude to the participants .but at each stage, some possible conversational moves would be excluded as conversationally unsuitable. we might then formulate a rough general principle which participants will be expected to observe, namely: make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged. on might label this cooperative principle.”ii. an analysis of friends depends on the maxim of quantity. “ones contribution should provide sufficient, but not too much information.”2 that is to say, an efficient speaker should know when and where to stop talking and not over do it. more information will enhance comprehension, but too much will lead to just the opposite. however, if the speaker violates quantity maxim on purpose, he might bring about some humorous effect. let us consider some examples from the following scenes in the american sitcom friends.a. make your contribution as informative as required.(1)mrs. geller: what that rachel did to her life.we ran into her parents at the club, they were not playing very well.mr. geller: im not goanna tell you what they spent on that wedding.but forty thousand dollars is a lot of money!mrs. geller: well, at least she had the chance to leave a man at the altar.monica: whats that supposed to mean?mrs. geller: nothing! its an expression. (episode 1, scene 2)in （1）scene, monica and her mother mrs. geller are talking about rachels runaway from her wedding .mrs. geller finishes only half of what she wants to say (well, at least she had the chance to leave a man at the altar.).her infringement of the first maxim of quantity can be analyzed that she is reluctant to say more since the hearer, monica, is her daughter who has a high level of self-respect. so mrs. geller doesnt want to injure monicas self-esteem by withdrawal the latter half of the sentence. while in fact both monica and the audience can infer that mrs. gellers implied meaning is that rachel at least has the chance to get married but you, monica, has not a boyfriend. after drawing the inference, the humorous effect is generated simultaneously.(2)time lapse. now everyone but ross and phoebe is back at monica and rachels.joey: how could you lose him?rachel: i dont know. we were watching tv, and then he pooped in monicas shoe.monica: wait. he pooped in my shoe? which one?rachel: i dont know. the left one.monica: which ones?rachel: oh. oh, those little clunky amish things you think go with everything. (episode 1, scene 19)in (2) rachel tells monica that marcel, the monkey, relieves nature in her shoes (he pooped in monicas shoe).monica is astonished and asks “which one?” .monicas question violates the first maxim of quantity because she doesnt present adequate information for rachel to make an answer. in fact, monicas question can be understood either “which pair of shoes?” or “which one of the shoes, right one or left one?” accordingly, monicas inadequate information leads to rachels misunderstanding answer “the left one”. but what monica wants to know is which pair of shoes. similarly, the same misunderstanding happens in sceneb. do not make your contribution more informative as required. (3)scene: monica and rachels, everyone is sitting around the kitchen table. rachels credit cards are spread out on the table along with a pair44 of scissors.rachel: oh god, come on you guys, is this really necessary? i mean, i can stop charging anytime i want.monica: cmon, you cant live off your parents your whole life.rachel: i know that. thats why i was getting married.phoebe: give her a break, its hard being on you r own for the first time.rachel: thank you.phoebe: youre welcome. i remember when i first came to this city. i was fourteen. my mom had just killed herself and my step-dad was back in prison, and i got here, and i didnt know anybody. and i ended up living with this albino guy, who was, like, cleaning windshields outside port authority, and then he killed himself, and then i found aromatherapy. so believe me, i know exactly how you feel. (episode 1, scene 1)(4)chandler: can you see my nipples through this shirt?rachel: no. but dont worry; im sure theyre still there. (episode 1, scene 15)in (3) all the friends are there to encourage rachel to cut her credits as a ritual to enter into independent life instead of depending on her fathers sustentation. phoebe, in order to encourage rachel, gives a very detailed recounting of her misfortune when she first comes to new york. but her depiction is too detailed including her mothers suicide, her step-fathers imprisonment, her living with an albino guy, etc. of course, phoebe gives too much information and violates the second maxims of quantity. she is a little bit straying from the subject, because the other guys will be attracted to show pity for her instead of supporting rachels independence ritual. whats more, phoebes overmuch and ridiculous examples make the audience laugh.in (4), we have to get some knowledge about the prelude of the story in order to understand the humor. in this scene, in monica and rachels, chandler walks in and starts raiding the fridge. then rachel comes out of the shower with a towel wrapped round her waist, drying herself with another towel. chandler and rachel startle each other and she drops the towel for a second and snatches the rug off the couch. however, thats a relatively open weave so chandler sees rache