A Relevance-Theoretic Research To Verbal Humor

Humor, a spice in daily life and an indispensable part in our life, exists everywhere. It is one of the characteristics of human beings distinguished from animal behavior. In our daily life, various types of humor in different forms can be found everywhere and play an irreplaceable role in our social activities."Sense of humor"even becomes a symbol to evaluate one's educational level and personality. So the research on humor has not only profound theoretical significance, but also practical use. As a peculiar language phenomenon, humor plays an important role in English culture. In daily communication, humor not only ameliorates relations of human beings, improves the communicative atmosphere, but also is the symbol of personal wit, glamour and education. In China, for most English learners, it is still a bottleneck to understand and use English humor. A breakthrough will greatly draw their interest in English learning, enrich their background knowledge and improve their English study.Humor has attracted the attention and interests of scholars in many fields for its mechanism and functions. Disciplines like philosophy, esthetics, psychology, physiology, sociology, etc. have placed a long-term focus and accumulated many fruitful findings on the study of verbal humor in their respective fields. By contrast, linguistics is rather a newcomer and the cognitive pragmatic study of verbal humor is particularly the case. This paper tends to interpret verbal humor phenomenon with relevance theory from the perspective of cognitive pragmatics. There are altogether five chapters in this article.Chapter One introduces the humorous phenomenon in general.Chapter Two introduces the etymology, definition, and classification of humor, provides an overview of the previous studies and theories of humor, including the superiority theory, the incongruity theory and the release theory, and the relation between Grice's cooperative principle (CP) and humor. However, it is not enough to explain humor only by such proposition as humor is produced by the violation the maxims. Then Raskin puts forward his cooperative principle for the non-bona-fide communication mode of joking, which claims that the hearer perceives the intention of the speaker as an attempt to make him laugh. On the theoretical basis of Grice's CP, Raskin's non-bona-fide theory is an appropriate substitute of the CP theory. Chapter Three illustrates general framework of relevance theory (RT), including the...