A Study Of Verbal Humor From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

Language humor is a usual phenomenon in human communication. It is an interdisciplinary subject connected with a wide range of learning. Up to now, a great deal of research has been done from the viewpoint of psychology and sociology, hi the field of linguistics, some explorations have already been made in regard to its semantic and rhetorical aspects, but due attention has not been paid to it in pragmatics in that in everyday verbal communication, humorous utterances are easy to enjoy but hard to define. Apart from its capability of laughter-making, language humor is more often than not, produced to implicitly perform some communicative functions, not achievable by explicit expressions. This thesis, based on the fruitful studies of humor, attempts to investigate the mechanisms of English humor from the perspective of a new theory ?Relevance Theory.Sperber and Wilson's Relevance Theory (1986/1995, 1987) is based on a definition of relevance and two general principles: the Cognitive Principle that human cognition tends to be geared to the maximization of relevance; and the Communicative Principle that utterances create presumptions of optimal relevance. However, in normal communication, people's cognitive expectation of optimal relevance is not always guaranteed. It follows from the Communicative Principle that, an utterance, once uttered, is supposed to be optimally relevant. When the bear's expectation of maximal relevance is extremelydifferent from, or incongruous with the speaker' s actual utterance of optimal relevance, humorous effects accompanied by misunderstanding occur. According to Sperber and Wilson, relevance is defined in terms of cognitive effects and processing effort: (a) The greater the cognitive effects, the greater the relevance, (b) The smaller the processing effort, the greater the relevance. As verbal humor is generally employed to implicitly perform some communicative functions, besides making people laugh, it involves an element of indirectness or accidental irrelevance, which is to decrease its relevance and require extra processing effort. Nonetheless, the extra processing effort implies additional effects. In the comprehension of verbal humor, the extra processing effort invested is to be offset by additional humorous effects, by which the audience will be amused. And this also explicates why people prefer to produce and comprehend humorous utterances, which are virtually more effort-demanding.