Problem: Pragmatics and Comedy
We have, so far, studied what Pragmatics is, as a discipline, and why Pragmatics is important. Specifically, we studied the role of speaker intention and hearer interpretation in meaning creation. Comedians frequently use various strategies to create comedy by manipulating language, strategies which often involve the hearer's inferencing process in processing the speaker's intended meanings. In other words, comedy is often constructed by a purposeful manipulation of the speaker's(s') intended meaning on the part of the hearer(s).
Mind Your Language is a British TV comedy show that premiered in 1977. The characters in the sitcom are an English teacher, Mr. Brown, and his adult language students from various parts of the world. There are a host of issues that helped contribute to the tremendous success of the show, but at the heart of the show, is the manipulation of language at a pragmatic level.
For this problem, I want you to watch of one of the episodes called "Queen for a day." In addition to Mr. Brown and the students, the other characters you see here are Miss Courtney, the Head of the school where the students are enrolled, Sid, the caretaker of the school, and Gladys, the lady who works in the coffee shop.
a) Analyze this episode and identify all the reasons for miscommunication and misunderstanding - they could be lexical, syntactic, etc. Explain specifically what contributes to the miscommunication in the utterance. You can present your findings in the form of a list - supply an utterance and provide what, specifically, about the utterance contributes to miscommunication. Be specific in your analysis - go back to our first couple of lectures.
b) Next, from your list of miscommunications, identify all indirect speech acts and explain what the locutionary and illocutionary forces of the speech acts are, and explain how they contributed to the humor of the episode.