以《破产姐妹》为例分析违反合作原则产生的幽默_英语论文

On Humor Achieved by Violating the Cooperative Principle-A Case Study on Two Broke Girls

摘要

《破产姐妹》是近几年在《老友记》，《生活大爆炸》以及《摩登家庭》等喜剧之外比较成功的一部情景喜剧，主要讲述了在纽约市布鲁克林一家小餐馆里两个破产女孩的为实现创业梦想奋斗的故事。然剧中演员台词稍显低俗，但是却因为剧中角色大量频繁幽默语言的使用使得该剧取得巨大成功，并且受到热烈的欢迎和喜爱。但是，许多观众，特别是非英语国家的观众却因为各种原因无法理解其中的幽默。在这些原因中，幽默的语言产生机制就是其中一个很重要的原因，所以分析情景剧中幽默的产生既非常重要，也很必要。本文将从违反合作原则的角度分析美剧《破产姐妹》中幽默的产生。

本文将从会话理论角度分析破产姐妹中的幽默。根据会话理论，我们可以知道幽默的产生主要是由两个因素决定的，那就是会话含义和对四大准则的违背。在格莱斯1967 年《对话与逻辑》演讲中提出，人们的语言交流通常遵守一定的准则，即会话原则。但是语言学家们同时也发现人们在交流的时候并不是总是遵守这个原则，对这个原则的违背则构成了会话含义的产生，人们甚至经常故意违背原则来产生一定的会话含义，幽默就是其中一种会话含义。所以论文将选择破产姐妹中的一些对话为例，分析其如何通过对合作原则的违背来产生幽默效果。最后也会指出一些本文研究对更好的理解和欣赏日常对话中的幽默以及如何制造幽默的意义。

论文的首先介绍了论文的研究目标和意义以及论文结构，第一章介绍了之前对于会话理论和幽默理论的研究，第二章详细介绍会话理论，第三章分析会话理论在破产姐妹中的应用产生的幽默效果，最后一章给出了论文结论以及指明一些本文的局限。

关键词：合作原则 四大准则 会话含义 幽默 破产姐妹

Abstract

Two Broke Girls is a relatively successful sitcom except the Friends, The Big Bang Theory and Modern Family in recent few years. The sitcom describes two young women who waitress at a greasy spoon diner in Williamsburg strikes up an unlikely friendship in the hopes of launching a successful business. Though some dialogues are vulgar, the sitcom still gets a big success and great popularity for its use of huge numbers and high frequency of humor in the character’s dialogues. However, many audiences, especially the non-English speakers can’t understand the humor in the sitcom for all kinds of reasons, among which the language mechanism of how humors are produced is one of them, so it is important and necessary to analyze the mechanism that how humor is achieved in the sitcom, thus people can finally better understand humor and enjoy the fun in the sitcom. This thesis is going to analyze the humor in Two Broke Girls realized by violating the Cooperative Principle (CP).

Based on CP, the realization of humor is closely related to two elements: conversational implicature and the violation of the four maxims of CP. In H.P. Grice’s lecture Logic and Conversation in 1967, he pointed out that people all follow the principle of CP in language communication. However, linguistics also notice that language users do not always observe the principle of CP while they communicate and in this case the violation of the four maxims---maxim of quality, maxim of quantity, maxim of manner and maxim of relation often leads to meaning, known as the conversational implicature. People often break some of the principles on purpose to produce some certain conversational implicature in a certain context, including humor. So the thesis takes some examples from the Two Broke Girls to analyze its humor effect by violating the four maxims of CP. The author also gives some explanation to the influence of the research on the humor appreciation in daily conversation and humor making.

First, the author gives the aim and the significance of the research and the author also clarifies the structure of the thesis. The first chapter gives a general literature review of CP and humor, including their present and development and also related theories. The second chapter explains the theoretical framework of the CP. The approach to CP in Two Broke Girl 

is showed in the third chapter. The conclusion and the limitation of the research are given in the last chapter.

Keywords: Cooperative Principles Four Maxims Conversation Implicature Humor Two Broke Girls