Analysis of Verbal Humor in Friends from a Perspective of Pragmatic Presupposition

DOI

10.2991/assehr.k.191217.188How to use a DOI?

Keywords

pragmatic presupposition, verbal humor, Friends

Abstract

As an important theory in pragmatics, presupposition is characterized by mutual knowledge, defeasibility, and appropriateness, etc. Based on these properties, this article conducts a deep analysis of humorous dialogues in the sitcom Friends, with the aim to provide a deeper understanding of the nature and properties of presupposition as well as a fresh perspective for explaining the generative mechanism of verbal humor. The results indicate that presupposition is a powerful and common pragmatic strategy used in sitcoms to create humorous effect. Besides, it is found that pragmatic presupposition mainly generates verbal humor in the sitcom in two forms. First, humor appears when the audience perceives the contradiction between the presupposition uttered by a character and the fact or the speaker’s true feelings; second, humor appears when a character utters something that cancels the presupposition formed by the audience based on previous plots. It is hoped the attempt to combine pragmatics and humor psychology here can provide some insights into future research on this interdisciplinary field.

Copyright

© 2020, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Yang Yang
PY  - 2020
DA  - 2020/02/14
TI  - Analysis of Verbal Humor in Friends from a Perspective of Pragmatic Presupposition
BT  - Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Education, Language, Art and Inter-cultural Communication (ICELAIC 2019)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 544
EP  - 549
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/assehr.k.191217.188
DO  - 10.2991/assehr.k.191217.188
ID  - Yang2020
ER  -