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Title:
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Linguistic Approaches to the Analysis of Humour in Modern English Dramatic Comedy
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Author:
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Moeko Okada
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Email:
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click here to access email
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Degree Awarded:
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Lancaster University
, Department of Linguistics and English Language
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Degree Date:
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2001
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Linguistic Subfield(s):
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Discourse Analysis
Pragmatics
Ling & Literature
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Subject Language(s):
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English
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Director(s):
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Mick Short
Jonathan Culpeper
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Abstract:
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The aim of this thesis is to investigate and explore linguistic approaches to humour in modern English dramatic comedy. My research questions are: 1) What are the comical elements in dramatic comedy? 2) How well do frameworks and concepts in linguistics account for the comical elements in dramatic comedy?
Humour has been a neglected area in linguistics until very recently, although it has been an object of study in many other disciplines. Even though humour is dealt with in linguistic studies, many of them tend to pay attention to smaller units, such as the lexical or sentence level. Though I will start my analyses with humour at the small units, my focus will be on humour at the level of discourse as a whole.
This study necessarily involves an 'interdisciplinary' approach with linguistic, psychological, sociological and philosophical elements, because all these aspects affect the way people comprehend and perceive humorous texts. As the keystones of my thesis, I will take Foregrounding theory from Stylistics, and Incongruity theories from Humour Studies. After I have discussed some preliminary issues (i.e. three major theories of Humour, Stylistics, Drama, Bergson’s theory, etc.), I will present my analyses of linguistic humour in modern comedy in terms of the four approaches: the traditional linguistic approach, conversational approach, pragmatic approach, and cognitive approach. In each approach, I will include brief reviews of the eminent theories, some analyses of comedy extracts by means of those theories, and an evaluation of the approach. To conclude the thesis, I will present an analysis of a modern British comedy (Clouds by Michael Frayn) in order to explain elements of humour by taking the interdisciplinary approach.
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