PRAGMATIC STUDY OF BOVI AND BASKETMOUTH

1.3 Significance of the Study                                                                                                            This study focuses on the pragmatics of comedy. The study is significant in the following ways:

i. It describes the language of comedy from a pragmatic approach, which to the knowledge of

this researcher, has not been done before.

ii. It examines issues of politeness in the language of comedy.

iii. It examines the acts performed in the language of comedy.

iv. It will describe the linguistic features of the language of comedy. 

v. It will serve as a resource material for students, teachers and future researchers who may want to carry out similar research in pragmatics. 

vi. The study is also significant for its contribution to knowledge in the field of pragmatics.

1.4 Problem Statement

            This study is an analysis of the pragmatics of comedy. It is not uncommon knowledge about the role of comedy in society. Comedians manipulate language to create humour to make people laugh and this creates medicinal, physical and psychological effects on the audience. However, perhaps, the language of comedy, as known to this researcher, is one that has been barely described by linguists in the past, let alone from a pragmatic perspective; this research sets out to describe the language of comedy from a pragmatic approach using Bovi and Basket Mouth as case studies. The problem to be resolved in this research is covered in the research questions below.

1.5 Research Methodology

            This study is a descriptive analysis of the language of comedy from a pragmatic approach. The study adopts politeness principles and the speech act theory in its discussion of the language of comedy. The data is limited to selected comedies of Bovi and Basket Mouth streamed on YouTube and the responses (comments) of viewers. This means that the internet will provide a useful source of data for this study as primary data, while linguistic textbooks, journal articles, magazines and periodicals will serve as the secondary sources of information.

1.6 Scope and Limitation

This study comes under the purview of pragmatics. However, pragmatics is a broad field which covers a lot of subfields or subjects. This study is limited to the areas of politeness principles and speech acts in describing the language of comedy.

1.7 Research Questions

The study shall be guided by the following research questions:

i. What are the pragmatic features of the language of comedy?

ii. Are there politeness issues in the language of comedy?

iii. What are the types of acts performed in the language of comedy?

1.8 Motivation of the Study                                                                                     

Comedians have manipulated language to create humour for the interest of their audience. Their role in society cannot be over emphasized. However, to the best of this researcher's knowledge, linguists have paid little or no attention to the description of the language of comedians especially from a pragmatic standpoint. One wonders what act they perform whenever they use language and what are the issues of politeness that describe their language use? These questions motivated this study.

CHAPTER TWO

LITERATURE REVIEW

2.0   Introduction

This chapter reviews past literature in pragmatics. It discusses, among other things, issues of politeness in pragmatics, speech act theory, the place of humour in pragmatics, pragmatics in the media, and the biographies of Bovi and Basket Mouth.

2.1 Pragmatics: An Overview

Norrick (4) conceives of pragmatics as the study of the context-dependent aspects of meaning which are systematically abstracted away from in the construction of logical form. In the semiotic trichotomy developed by Morris, Carnap, and Peirce in the 1930's, syntax addresses the formal relations of signs to one another, semantics the relation of signs to what they denote, and pragmatics the relation of signs to their users and interpreters.

According to Wolfram and Norrick (2), even though its roots can be traced back to early classical traditions of rhetoric and stylistics, to Immanuel Kant's conception of pragmatics as empirical and purposive and to William James, who pointed out its practical nature, modern pragmatics is a fairly recent discipline. Its inauguration as an independent field of study within semiotics took place early in the 20th Century by C. Morris, R. Carnap and ultimately C.S. Peirce. The classic division between syntax, semantics, and pragmatics goes back to Morris, who distinguished three separate "dimensions of semiosis" within his science of signs. According to Morris (21-22), one may study the relations of signs to the objects to which the signs are applicable. This relation will be called the semantical dimension of semiosis, symbolized by the sign 'DSEM'; the study of this dimension will be called semantics. Or the subject of study may be the relation of signs to interpreters. This relation will be called the pragmatical dimension of semiosis, symbolized by the sign 'DP'; the study of this dimension will be named pragmatics. One important relation of signs has not yet been introduced: the formal relations of signs to one another. [ - ] This third dimension will be called the syntactical dimension of semiosis, symbolized by the sign 'DSYN', and the study of this dimension will be named syntactics.

Morris attempts to separate semantics, pragmatics and syntax in the evaluation of linguistic meaning by also noting their point of convergence. According to Norrick (2), syntax studies the relations signs bear to other signs, semantics the relation between signs and objects, and pragmatics the relation between signs and their interpreters. Of course, there were and are differences of opinion on where exactly to draw the line between semantics and pragmatics. Some thirty years elapsed before pragmatics finally made its way into modern linguistics in the late 1960s, when linguists began to explore the performance phenomena. To this end, they adopted ideas developed and advanced by L. Wittgenstein, G. Ryle, P. Strawson, J.L. Austin and other eminent (ordinary or natural) language philosophers. It seems safe to claim that the ensuing 'pragmatic turn' was most notably induced by J.L. Austin, J.R. Searle and H.P. Grice, who were interested in utterance meaning rather than sentence or word meaning, i.e. in studying unique historical events created by actual speakers to perform linguistic acts in actual situational contexts in order to accomplish specific goals. Other scientific movements that nourished pragmatics include anthropology (B. Malinowski, P. Wegener, A. Gardiner), contextualism (J.R. Firth), functionalism (K. Buhler, R. Jakobson, D. Hymes), ethnomethodology (H. Garfinkel, E. Goffman, H. Sacks) and European sociology (J. Habermas). Since the pragmatic turn, pragmatics has developed more rapidly and diversely as a linguistic discipline. Since the 1970s, the early Anglo-American framework of pragmatic-linguistic study has been immensely expanded and enhanced by research in Continental Europe and elsewhere. With historiographic hindsight, it can be seen that the broadening, i.e. the interdisciplinary expansion, of the field of pragmatics has been a cumulative process; the broader conception of pragmatics chronologically (and

causally) followed the narrower one.

Despite its scientific acclaim, the notion of pragmatics remains somewhat enigmatic and is still difficult to define. This holds for its readings in everyday discourse as well as in scholarly contexts. Nonetheless, when people refer to attitudes and modes of behaviour as pragmatic, they mean that they have a factual kind of orientation in common. People who act pragmatically or take a pragmatic perspective generally have a preference for a practical, matter of fact and realistic rather than a theoretical, speculative and idealistic way of approaching imminent problems and handling everyday affairs. To put it differently, they share a concrete, situation-dependent approach geared to action and usage rather than an abstract, situation-indespendent and system-related point of view. To assume a pragmatic stance in everyday social encounters as well as in political, historical and related kinds of discourse, means to handle the related affairs in a goal-directed and object-directed, common-sense and down to earth kind of way. Such an understanding of pragmatics as an attitude in non-scientific discourse has obviously left its traces in scientific definitions of the term.