A Relevance-theoretic Account Of Verbal Humor In Friends

As an everyday phenomenon, humor is increasingly becoming an indispensable part of human communication. However, humor study from the perspective of pragmatics, Relevance Theory in particular has not been made widely available. In this thesis, Sperber and Wilson's Relevance Theory is analyzed as to its explanation of how verbal humor is interpreted and linguistically and logically produced. One main claim of Relevance Theory is that human beings rely on one single interpretive principle, which they invariably use in their attempt to select the communicators' intended interpretation. As will be shown in the thesis, this theoretical claim is valid for humorous utterances as well. The steps involved in this interpretative procedure may be predicted to a greater or lesser extent, which provides communicators with the key to the necessary control over the eventual interpretation of their humorous discourse. Besides, linguistic and logical strategies of humorous utterances whose source of laughter is based on will be illustrated with a solid number of joke examples from American sitcom Friends and interpreted against our Relevance analysis model to test the reliability and effectiveness of the model. We would like to argue that verbal humor can be satisfactorily analyzed by using our three-level humor interpretation model.