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1.2 methodology and Data Selection

This thesis revolves around the explanatory power of pragmatic ambivalence inverbal humor. Thus large amounts of humorous conversations are going to beanalyzed. As pragmatic ambivalence studies not the literal meaning but the underlyingillocutionary forces of utterances; what’s more, there aren’t particular words whichcan denote the existence of pragmatic ambivalence, thus it is difficult to adopt aquantitative study of pragmatic ambivalence.In the study, we mainly adopt a qualitative method. Various humorousconversations will be listed and analyzed from the perspective of pragmaticambivalence so as to uncover its relationship with humor.This study is corpus-based. After careful consideration, Friends, a famous sitcomonce broadcasted on NBC, is chosen as the research material. This choice is not madeat random. Firstly, Friends has in total 234 episodes and the scripts of it have nearly 1million words. The sitcom centers on the interesting stories happened in the everydaylife of six friends living in New York. Thus, large amounts of informal spokenlanguages exist in Friends. Besides, in Friends, one can find humorous utterancesfrequently used in their daily conversations. Friends is very popular across the worldand the languages used in it are genuine to the languages used in true life. All theseaccount for the reliability of the data resources.  

1.3 Thesis Structure

This thesis consists of five parts: introduction; literature review; a theoreticalframework; the analysis of the verbal humor in Friends from the perspective ofpragmatic ambivalence; and the conclusion about major findings.Chapter One intends to provide a general introduction to the research. It mainlyconcerns the need for study, methodology and data selection and the general structureof the thesis.Chapter Two is a literature review of vague theories at home and abroad fromdifferent disciplines.Chapter Three provides a theoretical framework of pragmatic ambivalence andlays the theoretical foundation for the analysis of humorous utterances.Chapter Four is a detailed analysis of how humor is produced through pragmaticambivalence. In this chapter, the underlying relations between humor and pragmaticambivalence will be disclosed and a certain amount of humorous conversations inFriends is going to be analyzed so as to reveal their underlying relations.Chapter Five is the conclusion. It summarizes the major findings of the thesis,presents the limitations of the present study and makes suggestions for further studies..

Chapter Two Literature Review.....................................................................................4

2.1 Vagueness from the Philosophical Perspective....................................................4

2.2 Vagueness from Psychological Perspective.........................................................6

2.3 Vagueness from Linguistic Perspective ...............................................................7

Chapter Three Theoretical Frameworks ......................................................................12

3.1Pragmatic Ambivalence ......................................................................................12

3.1.1 Definition of Pragmatic Ambivalence.........................................................12

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