Previous Research Findings LITERATURE REVIEW AND CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK

sitcom, usually it presents the real kinds of humor that exists in their society. The researcher employes Martin’s theory of forms of humor in his book The Psychology of Humor . According to Martin 2007: 25, there are three forms of humor that happen in people’s everyday conversation. The first is jokes that are prepackaged humorous anecdotes that people memorize and pass on to one another. The second is spontaneous conversational humor that consists of eleven types, i.e irony, satire, sarcasm, overstatement and understatement, self-depreciation, teasing, replies to rhetorical questions, clever replies to serious statement, double entendres, transformations of frozen expressions, and puns. The last one is unintentional humor that consists of two types, i.e accidental physical humor and accidental linguistic humor. Humor affects the communicative interaction of the speakers, or in other words it has social goals. The researcher employs Attardo’s theory in his book Linguistic Theories Humor. Attardo 1994: 320-329 grouped the social goals of humor on the communicative process into four classes; social management, decommitment, mediation, and defunctinalization. The diagram of the formulation of the research is presented in Figure 1. 47 Figure 1. Analytical Construct Modern Family Season 4 Maxim of Quantity Maxim of Quality Maxim of Relation Maxim of Manner Flouted Humor Forms Functions Jokes Spontaneous Conversational Humor Unintentional Humor Mediation Defunctionalization Social Management Decommitment Cooperative Principles a. Irony g. Replies to rhetorical question b. Satire h. Clever replies to serious statement c. Sarcasm i. Double entendres d. Overstatement and Understatement j. Transformation of frozen expression e. Self-deprecation k. Puns f. Teasing Pragmatics 48

CHAPTER III RESEARCH METHOD

The research had three objectives to discuss, namely to analyze the maxims that are flouted by the characters to create humor, to describe and explain the forms of humor created by maxim flouting, and to explain the functions of humor created by maxim flouting in Modern Family Season 4. To reveal the goals, an appropriate method was applied. In this chapter, the researcher focused on the research method. The researcher divided this chapter into four parts of discussion: type of the research – describing the approach of conducting this study; data preparation – including object of the research, data and source of data, research instrument, and techniques of data collection; data analysis – showing how the data are analyzed; and data trustworthiness – describing how the validity of the data findings is checked.

A. Type of Study

This study was categorized as descriptive qualitative research since it emphasized on the phenomenon of the use of language in its context by interpreting the data. According to Wiersma 1995:12, descriptive qualitative research is defined as research that describes phenomenon in the form of words instead of numbers or measures. Bogdan and Biklen 1982:28 state that in the qualitative research, the data are collected in the form of words or pictures rather