Relevance-theoretic Analysis Of Verbal Humor

As a language phenomenon, verbal humor permeates in people's daily communication. It plays an important role in our life. In daily communication, humor ameliorates human relations and improves the communicative atmosphere, simultaneously, is endowed with the symbol of personal wit, glamour and education. Humor language is both interesting and amusing, during which it implies the other implicatures. This paper aims at analyzing and studying of verbal humor from a relevance-theoretic perspective. In Sperber and Wilson's opinion, relevance in general is a rule obeyed by people in their communication. As far as language communication is concerned, it is a natural trend for language user to process the most relevant information to reach optimal balance between his efforts and the effects his efforts yield so as to achieve the best informational results.Language itself is never completely explicit. The hearer must infer the speaker's informative intention on the basis of the linguistic input, plus his enclyopaedic knowledge. Every speaker must make his hearer notice firstly the incongruity of the utterance, cause him to pay more efforts and eventually find out the relevant information to understand the humor. Verbal humor can be characterized as incongruity both in humorous rhetorical devices such as metaphor, irony, and pun, and in some non-rhetorical utterances, for example, jokes and humors. There is a close relationship between language and cultural context, for cultural context can provide some information that is necessary for understanding language to a large degree. Verbal humor, as a special kind of language, its understanding naturally relies on the cultural context. The interpretative function of cultural context helps the language learner to eliminate ambiguity, infer the speaker's attitude and derive implicatures.