Relevance Theory And Humor Understanding

Humor is laughable and amusing. It reflects the speaker's wisdom and attitudes towards life and brings us great pleasure. The present thesis is a tentative exploration into the cognitive process of humor understanding within the framework of RT (Sperber&Wilson, 1986/1995). It firstly attempts to answer the question of how the hearer/reader, as the recipient of humor, seeks relevance of the humorous utterance and ultimately perceives its humorous effect.In the literature review, we find previous studies on humor have mainly focused on how the element of incongruity is generated and detected based on the incongruity theory. However, a mere discussion of the entertainment of incongruity is not adequate for revealing the cognitive process of humor understanding.RT provides a new perspective on the analysis of humor understanding. From a relevance-theoretic point of view, humor understanding is a cognitive process of searching for relevance. The communicative principle of relevance plays an essentially guiding role in the process. By means of data analysis, we depict the process as follows: in humorous communication, the hearer at first finds out that the utterance is incongruous and irrelevant. Driven by the expectation of relevance, he assumes that this irrelevance is apparent and further infers implicit meanings or attitudes conveyed by the utterance, such as being optimistic, mocking and playful. At this point, a humorous interpretation of...