Abstract:

For the past few years, American sitcom like friends, which was definitely a hit at one time, has swept across the whole world. With the broadcast of How I Met Your Mother and The Big Bang Theory, situation comedy, currently, is still gaining its popularity among English lovers. Watching American sitcoms contributes not only to the cultivation of our interest in English learning, but also to the improvement of our cross-cultural communication competence. But with subtitles at hand, we sometimes still find ourselves at a loss to the jokes, which really can be a pain in the neck. What’s so funny? Well, this paper, on the theoretical basis of Grice’s Cooperative Principle(CP), ventures on an attempt to analyze the characters’ mental process from some examples of the three American sitcoms which I like most to see how conversational implicature is applied to dialogues and how humorous effects are achieved.

Keywords: Conversational Implicature; Cooperative Principle; American Sitcom; Dialogues; Humorous Effects

摘  要：

在过去的几年里，美国情景喜剧《老友记》的热播曾轰动一时并且红遍全球，而近几年《生活大爆炸》《老爸老妈的浪漫史》等的窜红让情景喜剧在美剧的爱好者中再次掀起一股收看热潮。好看而有趣的美剧不仅能培养我们对学习英语的兴趣，更能提高我们跨文化交流的能力。可是尽管有字幕帮忙，我们有时仍觉得对其中的一些笑点百思不得其解，这真是一件头疼的事。到底笑点在哪里呢？本文就以美国哲学家格莱斯提出的合作原则理论为基础，从以上三部我最爱的美剧中选取了部分对白，大胆尝试分析剧中人物的心理活动，以此体会在当时语境下的会话含义，即人物交流中的言外之意，以及所产生的幽默效果。

关键词：会话含义；合作原则；情景喜剧；对话；幽默效果

1  Introduction
 With the quickening process of globalization, we are more easily exposed to American culture in a hierarchy of aspects, among which American movies and TV programs of various kinds have found a ready market in China. Situation comedy, often shortened to sitcom, as a genre of comedy that features characters sharing the same common environment, such as a home or workplace, with often humorous dialogues, is currently found extremely appealing. To make the audience laugh as much as possible is said to be the ultimate aim of situation comedy. And such humor is embodied in dialogues and conversations, without which no sitcom can be acted out. However, the problem is that even if we have subtitles available when watching American sitcoms, we may get stumbled and baffled by some implied conversations, thus totally at a loss to where the laughing points are. This is quite similar to Chinese idiom“话中有话”，which means having one’s tongue in one’s cheek. To figure out what is behind the superficial meanings, we need to introduce Conversational Implicature Theory.