Abstract: Two Broke Girls is a relatively successful sitcom except the Friends, The Big Bang Theory and Modern Family in recent few years. The sitcom describes two young women who waitress at a greasy spoon diner in Williamsburg strikes up an unlikely friendship in the hopes of launching a successful business. Though some dialogues are vulgar, the sitcom still gets a big success and great popularity for its use of huge numbers and high frequency of humor in the character’s dialogues. However, many audiences, especially the non-English speakers can’t understand the humor in the sitcom for all kinds of reasons, among which the language mechanism of how humors are produced is one of them, so it is important and necessary to analyze the mechanism that how humor is achieved in the sitcom, thus people can finally better understand humor and enjoy the fun in the sitcom. This thesis is going to analyze the humor in Two Broke Girls realized by violating the Cooperative Principle (CP).

Based on CP, the realization of humor is closely related to two elements: conversational implicature and the violation of the four maxims of CP. In H.P. Grice’s lecture Logic and Conversation in 1967, he pointed out that people all follow the principle of CP in language communication. However, linguistics also notice that language users do not always observe the principle of CP while they communicate and in this case the violation of the four maxims---maxim of quality, maxim of quantity, maxim of manner and maxim of relation often leads to meaning, known as the conversational implicature. People often break some of the principles on purpose to produce some certain conversational implicature in a certain context, including humor. So the thesis takes some examples from the Two Broke Girls to analyze its humor effect by violating the four maxims of CP. The author also gives some explanation to the influence of the research on the humor appreciation in daily conversation and humor making.

First, the author gives the aim and the significance of the research and the author also clarifies the structure of the thesis. The first chapter gives a general literature review of CP and humor, including their present and development and also related theories. The second chapter explains the theoretical framework of the CP. The approach to CP in Two Broke Girls 

is showed in the third chapter. The conclusion and the limitation of the research are given in the last chapter.

 Keywords: Cooperative Principles Four Maxims Conversation Implicature Humor Two Broke Girls

Contents

Abstract

摘要

Introduction-1

Chapter One Literature Review-5

1.1 Previous Study Concerning Cooperative Principle (CP)-5

1.1.1 The Proposal of Cooperative Principle and Its Development-5

1.1.2 The Meaning and Influence of CP-6

1.2 Previous Study Concerning Humor-7

1.2.1 The Definition of Humor-7

1.2.2 The Humor Theory-9

1.3 Humor Caused by Violating the Four Maxims of CP-13

1.3.1 Humor Realized by Violating the Four Maxims of CP under the Superiority Theory-14

1.3.2 Humor Realized by Violating the Four Maxims under the Incongruity Theory-14

1.3.3 Humor Realized by Violating the Four Maxims under the Release Theory-15

Chapter Two Theoretical Framework-16

2.1 The Cooperative Principle-16

2.1.1 The Sub-principles of CP-The Four Maxims-16

2.1.2 The Violation of CP-Conversational Implicature-18

Chapter Three Cooperative Principle Approach to Humor-A Case Study on Two Broke Girl.19

3.1 Humor Achieved by Violating the Four Maxims under the Superiority Theory in Two Broke Girls-21

3.1.1 Humor Achieved by Violating the Maxim of Quantity under the Superiority Theory in Two Broke Girls-21

3.1.2 Humor Achieved by Violating the Maxim of Quality under the Superiority Theory in Two Broke Girls-23

3.1.3 The Humor Achieved by Violating the Maxim of Relation under the Superiority Theory in Two Broke Girls-25

3.1.4 Humor Achieved by Violating the Maxim of Manner under the Superiority Theory in Two Broke Girls-26

3.2 Humor Achieved by Violating the Four Maxims under the Incongruity Theory in Two Broke Girls-27

3.2.1 Humor Achieved by Violating the Maxim of quantity under the Incongruity Theory in Two Broke Girls-27

3.2.2 Humor Achieved by Violating the Maxim of Quality under the Incongruity Theory in Two Broke Girls-29

3.2.3 Humor Achieved by Violating the Maxim of Relation under the Incongruity Theory in Two Broke Girls-31

3.2.4 Humor Achieved by Violating the Maxim of Manner under the Incongruity Theory in Two Broke Girls-32

3.3 Humor Achieved by Violating the Four Maxims under the Release Theory in Two Broke Girls-33

3.3.1 The Humor Achieved by Violating the Maxim of quantity under the Release Theory in the Two Broke Girls-34

3.3.2 Humor Achieved by Violating the Maxim of Quality under the Release Theory in Two Broke Girls-36

3.3.3 Humor Achieved by Violating the Maxim of Relation under the Release Theory in Two Broke Girls-38

3.3.4 Humor Achieved by Violating the Maxim of manner under the Release Theory in Two Broke Girls-39

Chapter  Four  Conclusion-40

Bibliography..42

Acknowledgments