A Study Of Verbal Humor Based On Ambituity And Relevance Theory

Though humor is a common language phenomenon, it plays an important role in English culture. Humor exists everywhere in our daily life. An appropriate humor can not only bring laughter, but release tension, eliminate embarrassment and break away from awkward situation as well. The definition of humor is somewhat controversial. Some scholars think humor is a tone, a thinking mode; while others consider humor as an artistic style and an aesthetic form. Generally speaking, humor can be divided into two categories: situational humor and verbal humor. Language itself is not humorous. Only when it integrates with special context, can people understand humor entirely. So, verbal humor is the investigative object in this thesis.Nowadays, the study of humor theories has already become an independent and special discipline. Rapid development in linguistic theories, especially the progress of pragmatics, now widens our horizon and sharpens our eyes on humor research. The investigation of humor can be traced back to the ancient times. But the previous studies on humor have mainly focused on how the element of incongruity is generated on the basis of incongruity. Nevertheless, a mere discussion of incongruity is not adequate for interpreting the cognitive process of humor comprehension. It is after the publication of Relevance: Cognition and Communication that verbal humor was studied systematically and scientifically from pragmatic perspective.The present thesis is to explore and analyze English verbal humor by using basic theories of semantics and pragmatics. In the sphere of semantics, the author will explore verbal humor through the study of ambiguity which is a universal phenomenon in all natural languages. In the scope of pragmatics, on the basis of Relevance Theory brought forward by Sperber and Wilson, the author analyzes the verbal humor from the cognitive perspective. The ultimate purpose of the thesis is to provide a comparatively new picture of humor, which is quite different from the one depicted by traditional researchers.Eventually, the possible contribution to the linguistic research of verbal humor and its limitation are put forward in this thesis as well as the discussion of social and practical significance of this study in our country.