Pragmatics And Metalanguage Theory: Comparative Analysis

Zhuo Shanshan
Sa Sa
12090630
Francesca De Lucia
Academic writing
December 7, 2015
A Study of Humor in Friends and Love Apartment in Pragmatics and Metalanguage Theory
Introduction:
As the main form of humor, humorous language is common in our life along with a distinctive pragmatic feature. In my daily life, I sometimes feel confused towards the humor in American sitcom. In order to find out the reason, I take the American sitcom Friends and Chinese one Love Apartment as samples to do comparative analysis over the generation and understanding of English and Chinese humor in the basis of the previous research at home and abroad, by taking the theory of pragmatics cooperative principle, pragmatics politeness principle and metalanguage theory as the theoretical

Rachel: Oh my god. What happened? Monica: 60 guests. (episode 4, scene 6) (3-8) 展博：姐你养过狗吗？ 一菲：没有，不过...你是我养大的。我以前养过很多其它动物的， 不出三天全都死了，展博你真幸运！ (episode 3, scene 6)

In (3-7), “Catering a funeral for 60 people” can be understood as “providing food and drink for a 60 people’s funeral”, it can also be understood as “providing food and drink for 60 people who attended the funeral”. So this caused Rachel’s misunderstanding, which led to the generation of humor.
In (3-8), Yi FeiA plays joke on her twin brother by beating around the bush. Her words make some humor, but avoid embarrassment.
3.2 Humor Created by Violating the Politeness Principle (3-1) Ross: So you do know a little English. Paolo: Poco... a leetle. Ross: Do you know the word crapweasel? Paolo: No. Ross: That’s funny, because you know, you are a huge crapweasel! (episode 1, scene 7)