An Analysis Of Verbal Humor From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

Humor is an essential part of our daily life. There are also many theories about humor. Researchers have begun to study humor from the perspective of relevance theory: communicative and cognitive perspectives since the appearance of relevance theory. However, what strategies do humorists employ to produce humor effect in humor from the perspective of relevance theory? And wha(?) linguistic techniques are employed to realize such strategies? These questions need to be further discussed. This thesis employs ideas of relevance theory to interpret humor strategies in verbal humor and generalizes techniques of linguistic realization of such strategies in verbal humor. This thesis points out that relevance theory provides a more powerful theory framework to interpret verbal humor. On the basis of sample analyses, this thesis tries to generalize humor strategies used in verbal humor and techniques of linguistic realization of such strategies. The following is a brief outline of what will be covered in each chapter of this thesis.Introduction part of this thesis briefly summarizes the history of humor research and gives the starting point of this thesis. The literature review about humor research is introduced in Chapter One, which includes introducing the development of the meaning of the word "humor"; three traditional theories about humor: superiority theory, relief theory and incongruity theory; achievements in humor research of linguistics from the semantic, syntactic and pragmatic aspects. In the last part of this chapter it points out that relevance theory is paid much attention to in humor research.Then, main points of relevance theory are summarized in the next chapter. Chapter Three analyzes the general interpretation of verbal humor from the perspective of relevance theory. The most important part of this thesis is Chapter Four which analyzes humor strategies in verbal humor from the perspective of relevance theory and the linguistic realization of such strategies. There are two parts in this chapter: first it introduces that unification of covert and optimal relevant interpretations of utterance is one strategy to interpret the realization of humor effects, and it generalizes linguistic techniques of the unification in verbal humor: narrowing and broadening word meaning, employing acronyms with multiple meanings and giving relative degree adjectives, providing ambiguous sentence structures and using referents; then, the thesis analyzes that changes of hearer's cognitive contexts is another strategy to bring about humor effect and linguistic techniques for such changes are presented: giving utterances which ignore illocutionary meaning, concealing premise information, providing extra information, repeating and giving utterance of different semantic fields.