A Socio-Pragmatic Study of Joking in English and Arabic TV programs

Abstract

This study deals with joking as a socio-pragmatic phenomenon. Joking can be defined as something said to provoke people’s laughter and amusement. This study deals with joking and its relation to socio-linguistics and pragmatics focusing on its concept, its relation to politeness and cooperative principle. The present study also discusses politeness being one of the main sociolinguistic theories that are interrelated to joking. The main problem of the current study illustrates the interrelationship between cooperative principles on one hand and joking, politeness on the other.

The study aims at shedding light on the use of joking in English and Arabic TV programs, showing joking as a socio-pragmatic phenomenon and also showing the difference between English and Arabic programs concerning joking. This paper is divided into a number of sections.

The introductory section is devoted to the term joking as a concept, and also through the lens of socio-linguistics, and pragmatics as well as Grice’s cooperative principle since this principle is incompatible with joking. There follows separate sections regarding the limitations of the study, the procedures as well as collecting and analyzing data.

The methodology section provides a presentation of data analysis and the findings and statistics therein, which represent the practical side of the study. In this study, some joking texts from different English and Arabic TV programs were collected for analysis. Many episodes were analysed and six texts of joking were selected from both languages (English and Arabic) depending on specific programs. These texts that convey a sense of joking were analysed sociopragmatically.

Results show that from a sociolinguistic level, English joking tend to use polite and impolite expressions equally since both of them are used 50% in the selected data. Pragmatically speaking, English joking flouts the maxim of relevance in 50% of the selected data. Arabic joking tends to employ more polite than impolite forms of jokes. Concerning Grice's maxims, Arabic joking flouts the maxim of quality in 66%of the selected data, maxim of relevance and manner are flouted equally 16% each whereas quantity maxim is not flouted in all the selected data. This study concludes that ,pragmatically speaking, Grice’s maxims must be flouted in achieving any joke. Joking and politeness share the same aim, since both of them try to lessen the distance between the speaker and the hearer.