从礼貌原则的角度分析美国情景剧《老友记》第三季中的言语幽默

A Pragmatic Analysis of Verbal Humor in the Third Season of Friends from the Perspectives of the Politeness Principle

摘要

近年来，美国情景剧越来越流行，受到了大量的中国观众的追捧，这与剧中大量的言语幽默密切相关。作为日常生活中普遍存在的一种言语现象，幽默在人际交往中起着至关重要的作用。也因此，激发了许多国内外学者对其的研究兴趣。比如，有许多学者对言语幽默和一些语用学理论，特别是合作原则、礼貌原则等理论之间的关系进行研究。

因此，考虑到美国情景剧的流行及其广泛的日常用语，为了方便人们更容易理解美国情景剧中的言语幽默，本文以里奇的礼貌原则为基础，对之深度剖析。考虑到《老友记》是一部广受欢迎的美国喜剧，本研究将详细解释剧中因违反礼貌原则所产生的言语幽默以及对这类幽默的理解，这不仅有助于读者更好地了解他国不同的文化幽默和礼仪，提高语用能力，增强幽默感，而且对于那些想学习语言和增强人际交往的人来说，都有很大的实用意义。

关键词：言语幽默；《老友记》；礼貌原则

ABSTRACT

In recent couple of years, American sitcoms have become more and more popular among audiences, especially Chinese viewers, which can be contributed to the speech humor in these TV shows. As a common language phenomenon in daily life, Humor plays an important role in interpersonal interaction. Therefore, it arouses many scholars and experts’ interest of study. For example, there are many experts discussing the relationship of speech humor and some theories about pragmatics, such as the Cooperative Principle, the Politeness Principle and so on.

Thus, considering the great popularity of American sitcoms and widespread daily expressions in these shows, in order to make it convenient for people to comprehend these speech humor, this paper will analyze verbal humor in these shows deeply based upon the Politeness Principle of Leech. Considering the fact that Friends is an American comedy which enjoys great popularity, this research will expound speech humor created by a violation of the Politeness Principle in this TV series and its understanding, which not only is beneficial for readers to learn about the humor and etiquette in English culture, develop their pragmatic competence and strengthen their sense of humor, but also has quite strong practical significance for those people who would like to study language and strengthen interpersonal relationship.

Key words: Verbal humor; Friends; the Politeness Principle