A Relevance-Theoretic Analysis Of Verbal Humor In Everybody Loves Raymond

Humor is a particular linguistic phenomenon which widely exists in our daily life. As a special form of verbal communication, humor can reconcile embarrassment, and add flavor to our life; it is the embodiment of human wisdom and taste and it is the treasure of art of human languages. So the study of verbal humor is of great practical value.The study of verbal humor can be traced back to the era of Plato and Aristotle in ancient Greece, when people studied mainly in the field of physiology, psychology, anthropology and sociology. In recent years with the rising development of linguistics, people began to focus on the linguistics aspects to analyze verbal humor. The initial research was on semantics, rhetoric and syntax, then developed to the deixis, speech act, cooperation principle in pragmatics. With the rapid development of the emerging science--pragmatics, more and more scholars paid their attention to the meaning in use or the meaning in context. While another new science- Cognitive Linguistics not only studied the speaker meaning, but also turned to the study of utterance understanding from the new perspective of both speaker and hearer that is in cognitive point of view to interpret verbal humor. The relevance theory proposed by the French scholar Sperber and British scholar Wilson in 1986 was the cognitive pragmatics theory which has brought great influence in the field of pragmatics in recent years. This thesis is based on relevance theory, which has interpreted the process of verbal humor production and understanding. By the application of the two principles of relevance theory--the maximization of relevance (cognitive principle) and the optimal relevant principle (communicative principle), it tries revealing that the essence of verbal humor is the transition from the maximization of relevance to the optimal relevance. It classifies verbal humor in the American sitcom Everybody Loves Raymond by different techniques, aiming to explain the interpreted roles of relevance theory in verbal humor production and understanding.The whole thesis is composed of three parts: introduction, main body and conclusion.The first part is the introduction, it reviews the domestic and overseas researches on humor and presents the characteristics of the study, the theoretical and practical significance. This thesis has taken some corpus of Everybody Loves Raymond that aims to interpret the production and comprehension of verbal humor by relevance theory in cognitive pragmatics, and it also makes the persons who loves sitcom have a further understanding of verbal humor in sitcom.The second part is the main body that consists of three parts.Chapter One mainly introduces the summarized knowledge of the research objects: humor and sitcom. It contains two sections: the first section introduces the definition of humor, the functions of humor and three theories of humor (the superiority theory, the relief theory and the incongruity theory) and its modern linguistic study. The second section introduces the sitcom and the source of corpus Everybody Loves Raymond, and then briefly introduces the features of verbal humor in sitcom.Chapter Two introduces the applied theory of this thesis-- the relevance theory. It mainly contains definition of relevance, the two principles of relevance: the maximization of relevance (cognitive principle); the optimal principle (communicative principle); the ostensive-inferential mode and the significance of cognitive context. The first principle of relevance (cognitive principle): Human cognition tends to coincide with the maximization of relevance; and the second principle of relevance (communicative principle): each ostensive act of communication should be supposed that the communication act itself has the optimal relevance. Relevance is a relative concept; it is a continuum from the maximum relevance to the minimum relevance or no relevance. Its degree of strength depends on two factors: the processing efforts and the contextual effects. Under the same conditions, the smaller the processing effort is, or the stronger the contextual effect is, the greater the relevance is.Chapter Three is the part of empirical studies. It has taken the qualitative method of research to carry out the study with the corpus in the American sitcom Everybody Loves Raymond. The main emphasis of the research is how to understand the mental process of interpreting verbal humor in the appreciation of humor. The first section mainly talks about the theory of analyzing the formation mechanism of verbal humor by relevance theory. The verbal humor is a kind of ostensive-inferential communicative act; the theory for the verbal humor to produce laughter lies in that there is contrast of the meaning between the maximization of relevance and the optimal relevance; and the relevance is in inverse proportion to the processing efforts. When there is great disparity between the hearer's expectation of maximal relevance and the speaker's actual optimal relevance, the humorous effects will appear with misunderstanding and incongruity. In the form of language it showed us three cases, namely encyclopedic information, phonics, and syntax that produce the incongruity. In the cognitive level, it is produced by the results that the schema of response in relevant expectation of the hearer was broken and activated. And no matter the schema was broken or activated, it is the shift of cognitive context to the hearer. The second section has selected the instances to illustrate the five steps for understanding verbal humor by relevance theory. The third section has classified the verbal humor phenomenon in Everybody Loves Raymond by different techniques: the humor produced by the deviation of language form (phonetic sound, lexis and syntax); the humor produced by the deviation of meaning (semantics and the pragmatics), it analyzes these phenomenons by relevance theory and then interprets the realizing process of verbal humor. All these aim to illustrate that the relevance theory has a strong interpreted power to the production and comprehension of verbal humor.Chapter Four is about the findings and implications of this research. The first section contains the answers to the two questions, the relevant incongruity and the dynamic view of context. It also points out the barriers in understanding verbal humor.The second section is the implication in studying verbal humor: firstly it proposes the acquisition of relevance and humor; secondly it proposed some opinions and suggestions in language learning and teaching that based on the barriers in language learning. The Conclusion summarizes the main argumentation in the whole thesis, and it has pointed out the practical significance and theoretical value of relevance theory for understanding verbal humor.