Pragmatic Inference Of Humorous Utterances

Humor means the comic and laughable."It is the only form of communication in which a stimulus on high level of complexity produces a stereotyped, predictable response on the physiological reflex level"(Encyclopedia Britannia 9:5). It is an all-encompassing phenomenon in human communication. Most previous works on humor tend to be approached from the physiological, psychological, anthropological and sociological perspectives. In this thesis, a cognitive approach to humor is adopted within the framework of Relevance Theory developed by Sperber and Wilson (1986, 1995), in which a mental search for an optimally relevant interpretation covers the processing of humorous utterances and the derivation of humorous effects."Extra effort means extra effect."(Wilson, 1999:52)Relevance Theory, which makes the best use of human beings' linguistic abilities and cognitive abilities in particular, has undoubtedly been one of the most influential pragmatic theories in recent years ever since its appearance. The major reason for the impact it brings about seems to consist in the explanatory power it aims at and the noticeable improvement it makes on the past theoretical proposals. It has settled virtually all the problems or imperfections linked with Grice's program such as how contextual implications get involved in the process of communication. Relevance theory is not a theory specially designed for the analysis of humor, but its theoretical hypotheses are very suitable for the interpretation of humorous utterances. The significance of relevance theory for the study of humor lies in the claim that we should consider humor as a mental process or a cognitive process. This thesis aims to make a probe into how humorous utterances are interpreted by the application of cognitive inferential mechanism and several assumptions are presented for the comprehension process.Firstly, humorous utterance comprehension is entirely a pragmatic phenomenon since it depends on an inferential process against a certain context. It is acknowledged that the nature of humorous utterances lies in the contradiction inside the humorous form. The basic assumption of the incongruity theory is that humor arises as a reaction to what we perceive as incongruous. According to Relevance Theory,"every ostensive stimulus conveys a presumption of its own optimal relevance", any kind of communication is relevant. A humor act presupposes human participants and a stimulus. It is the speaker's utterances that produce a funny stimulus with the...