Arelevance Theory Approach To Humor In The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn

Humor is an important part of all cultures and languages. In modern competitive society, people always need to release the pressure with the help of humor. Also, it is a pervasive phenomenon that exists in all kinds of human communication, laughable humor sometimes implies some other communicative information, such as irony. Looking back on the former studies on humor, we may find out that these studies deal with such field as philosophy, sociology, psychology, anthropology and so forth, which makes humor become a multi-disciplinary object. With the rapid development of linguistics, especially the maturation of pragmatics, we have been endowed with a deeper view of vision and new perspectives to humor study, and some pragmatic theories are frequently used, such as cooperative principle, relevance theory, speech act theory.In this thesis, the author tries to make a detailed analysis on the verbal humor under the framework of relevance theory. All the data are selected from the masterpiece of American humorist Mark Twain---the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (shortened as Huckleberry Finn). The thesis will depict the cognitive process of verbal humor from the perspective of relevance theory and analyze the realizing process of verbal humor in the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. What s more, this thesis points out the main barriers in understanding and appreciating the utterance humor in Huckleberry Finn with some suggestions so as to reach successful communication.There are five chapters in the thesis. The first chapter gives a general introduction to humor, including its origin, definition and different types. In chapter two, in terms of pragmatics, former studies on humor are discussed, including Cooperative Principle and Speech Act Theory. Humor can be produced by the violation of four maxims: quality, quantity, relevance and manner. Besides, according to Austin, in our daily communication, words are not only used to say something, but also to do something. Under the framework of this theory, humorous effect is likely to be generated with the extra efforts paid by the hearer, which is always aroused in some certain contexts when people are communicating with each other. To fully appreciate the verbal humor, we'd better get to know the Relevance Theory in the next chapter. Chapter three reviews the theoretic framework of the thesis Relevance Theory. Cognitive principle and communicative principle of Relevance Theory are mainly expounded in this chapter. Chapter four and chapter five is the main body of the thesis, in which the author first generalizes five humor techniques of Huckleberry Finn, then makes a relevance-theoretic interpretation of verbal humor in detail by employing relevance, inference, processing effort, hence elaborating the realizing process of verbal humor by the use of Relevance Theory. Chapter five presents a relevance-theoretic account of the rhetoric techniques of humor in Huckleberry Finn, and also points out the main barriers in understanding and appreciating the utterance humor in Huckleberry Finn.By reading some articles, the author found that most previous studies on Mark Twain s works are from the perspective of literature, and there are few studies from the perspective of pragmatic theories. Therefore, the thesis explores the relevance theoretic account of verbal humor in literature understanding from the perspective of pragmatics, and concludes that there is a close relationship between linguistics and literature, a better understanding of humor will bring about a better appreciation of literature.