A Study On The Production And Interpretation Mechanism Of Humorous Puns With Adaptation-relevance Model

Pun is an important linguistic phenomenon. This thesis chooses the humorous puns as the investigation subject. Under the guidance of adaptation—relevance model, it analyzes both the production and interpretation mechanism of such puns. Through the analysis of these mechanisms, it tries to provide a complete cognitive process of humorous pun.This thesis first offers a brief review of previous studies on this topic. Through this review, the author finds that most researches in the past on puns took rhetoric or pragmatic approach. Few researches adopted cognitive one and a large proportion of such researches focused on the production mechanism. Therefore, this thesis aims to analyze the complete cognitive process.The present thesis adopts adaptation—relevance model as the theoretical foundation. Based on this model, the cognitive process is divided into production mechanism and interpretation mechanism, which are further divided into several stages. Through the analysis of these stages, the detailed illustration of cognitive process is provided by this thesis.This study is aimed at demonstrating the complicated cognitive process behind humorous puns and it is hoped that this thesis will contribute to the explanation of the cognition of verbal communication. Moreover, this thesis is an application of adaptation—relevance model to linguistic analysis, which would prove the validity of this model.