摘要

幽默是使人发笑的一种方式，它不仅可以吸引人们的注意力，更可以缓解人们的心里压力。格莱斯的合作原则和里奇的礼貌原则是语用学中重要的理论，其中合作原则包括质量原则、数量原则、关联原则和方式原则；礼貌原则包括得体准则、宽容准则、表扬准则、谦逊准则、同意准则和同情准则。本文以情景喜剧《家有儿女》为研究对象，选取其中具有代表性的幽默会话，运用合作原则和礼貌原则对其进行分析。研究发现在日常生活中，人们会不经意或刻意地违反合作原则或礼貌原则而产生一种或多种会话含义，最终达到一种幽默效果。对幽默言语的语用学研究不仅可以使人们更好地理解情景喜剧中不同角色的性格特点，更可以提高人们对日常会话中幽默的欣赏能力。

关键词: 幽默；合作原则；礼貌原则；情景喜剧；会话含义
 
Abstract

Humor is a way of speaking which can make people laugh. It can not only attract one’s attention, but also reduce one’s psychological pressure. Grice’s Cooperative Principle and Leech’s Politeness Principle are the important theories of pragmatics. The Cooperative Principle includes the maxim of quantity, the maxim of quality, the maxim of relation and the maxim of manner, while the Politeness Principle includes the tact and generosity maxims, approbation and modesty maxims, agreement maxim and sympathy maxim. This paper analyzes some representative conversations in Home with Kids on the basis of the Cooperative Principle and Politeness Principle. The study shows that people often flout these two principles inadvertently or deliberately in their daily lives to produce one or more conversation implicatures to achieve a humorous effect. This research can not only help people better understand the "characters” in sitcoms, but it can also improve people’s appreciation of humor in daily conversations. 

Key words: humor; Cooperative Principle; Politeness Principle; sitcom; conversation implicature

1.    An Overview of Humor
1.1 Definition of Humor
In recent years, more and more researchers show their interests in humor studies. However, it is hard to set an accurate definition of humor. In other words, the definition of humor has a lot of disputes from the past to present. “Humor” derived from the Latin word “humorr”, which means “liquid” or “fluid”. According to the Oxford Advanced Learner’s English-Chinese Dictionary, humor means the quality in something that makes it funny or amusing. Lin Yutang (2002) points out that humor is a way of exposing the mistakes of life through innuendo, allegory, puns and other rhetorical devices. The research about humor was first advanced by Freud, who defined the “essence of humor” as a process by which “one spares oneself the affects to which the situation would naturally give rise and overrides with a jest the possibility of such an emotional display” (qtd. in Lefcourt, 2001: 60). Attardo(1994) considers that humor contains all funny, amusing or the things that make you laugh. Humor is a special form of comedy, as well as a unique linguistic phenomenon which plays an important role in the language of culture and people’s communication.