An Analysis Of Verbal Humor In Russian Jokes From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

Verbal humour is a very popular object of study in modern linguistics.Verbal humour plays an important role in stress relief,mood improvement,embarrassment elimination and adjustment of interpersonal relationship.Moderate and pleasant verbal humour abounds in russian jokes.They serve as good material in this study.Relevance theory is one of the most important theories in cognitive pragmatics and is founded by D.Sperber and D.Wilson in 1986.This paper is finished from the perspective of relevance theory in cognitive pragmatics,in which verbal humour is analysed and studied in order to theoretically explain the comprehension process of verbal humour and explore the ways of verbal humour creation from the perspective of relevance theory.In this paper some concrete methods of semantic analysis such as propositional analysis,dictionary definition analysis and context analysis are used as the major research method.Through the research this paper has found out,that from the perspective of relevance theory,the hearer changes his maximally relevant understanding to optimally relevant understanding of the utterance in russian jokes,meanwhile the change of context also takes place,which makes him understand the communicative intention from the speaker in russian jokes.Moreover,people often use ways of humour creation from the phonetic,semantic,rhetorical and pragmatic aspects within the framework of relevance theory.The fresh idea of this paper is at its perspective of relevance theory in cognitive pragmatics,from which verbal humour in Russian jokes is analysed.And the content of this paper can make people more clearly understand the mental process of verbalhumour comprehension in Russian jokes,which can enrich the research on verbal humour in Russian jokes.