Abstract

    Friends, an American situation comedy, was one of the most popular TV series in Europe and America. In recent 20 years, many experts and scholars have studied its humorous conversations from various perspectives. And this thesis intends to analyse how its humorous effects are created in a wholly different way, i.e. from the Face Theory perspective.
The Face Theory is raised by Brown and Levinson (1987)to explain politeness phenomena. They defined "face" and divided it into two kinds: positive face and negative face. As they pointed out, everyone wanted face and once his face was threatened, he would try his best to save it. Thus Face Threatening Acts (FTAs) and Face Saving Acts (FSAs) appeared. By analysing people's FTAs and FSAs in Friends, this study is applying the Face Theory to studying the humorous effects of conversations, which will broaden the research scope of the Face Theory and provide new ideas for scholars. Meanwhile, this study is also beneficial to non-native English speakers for giving them a better comprehension of westerners' face and western humour.

Key words：face；Face Threatening Acts；Face Saving Acts；humourous effects；conversations

摘要

《老友记》是一部美国情景喜剧，是欧美地区最受欢迎的电视剧之一。近20年来有不少专家学者从不同的角度研究过它的幽默对话。本文将从一个全新的角度——面子理论，来探讨幽默效果是如何产生的。
面子理论是由布朗和列文森提出用来解释礼貌现象的理论。他们给面子下了定义并且将面子分成积极和消极两种。他们指出每个人都需要面子，一旦他的面子受到威胁，他就会竭尽全力去维护它。因此也出现了面子威胁行为和面子保全行为。本文通过分析《老友记》中人物的这两种行为，将面子理论应用于分析对话幽默效果，拓宽了面子理论的研究范围也给研究者提供了新的思路。同时，本研究也有利于那些母语为非英语人士更好地理解西方人的面子概念和西方幽默。

关键词：面子；面子威胁行为；面子保全行为；幽默效果；会话

1.Introduction
    Humour, defined by Nash in 1985 as “the unique nature of human being”, plays a very important role in people’s daily communication. The great success of Friends strongly proves that most people like to talk with humourous person and sometimes humour is the key to a successful conversation. As to face, it is related to everyone and needed by everyone. It is inevitable to threaten one's face when a person communicates with others and in turn people will try to save his face when it is threatened. Sometimes, humorous effects are created by these acts. Hence it is of great importance to study how those humorous effects are made by threatening or saving one's face.