An RT's Approach To Humor In Chinese SMS Text

SMS (short message service) text language refers to the language used at mobile phones, which results from factors such as economy, culture, environment and people's psychological activities of current era. SMS text is becoming a new idol of communication. Many linguists have paid close attention to the characteristics of this unique language. There are a lot of humorous utterances in SMS text. Humor in SMS text is amusing which reflects the SMS text writers'wisdom and life attitudes and brings us great pleasure.As a post-Gricean theory of pragmatics, Relevance Theory (hereinafter referred to as RT for short) has developed into a very influential theory in contemporary pragmatic research. Based on non-demonstrative inference, RT attempts to provide a thorough explanation on how hearers choose a particular interpretation that is consistent with the speaker's intention. According to Sperber and Wilson, what ensures communicative success is the pursuit of optimal relevance on the part of both the speaker and the hearer. It is the claim to optimal relevance that guides the hearer to identify the speaker's intended context for a given utterance. The search for optimal relevance guides the hearer not only to the speaker's intended context but also to the speaker's intended interpretation. The central claim of RT is that the expectations of relevance raised by an utterance are precise enough, and predictable enough, to guide the audience towards the speaker's meaning.RT provides a new perspective on the analysis of humor understanding. From a relevance-theoretic point of view, humor understanding is a cognitive process of searching for relevance. In Relevance Theory, a mental search for an optimal relevant interpretation covers the processing of verbal humor and the derivation of humorous effects. Extra effort means extra effects. When the hearer's expectation of maximal relevance is extremely different from or incongruous with the speaker's actual utterance of optimal relevance, humorous effects accompanied by misunderstanding occur. The thesis attempts to approach humor in Chinese SMS texts from the perspective of relevance and tries to discover the mechanism of constructing and understanding it.The thesis also lays emphasis on the incongruity in SMS text and employs Francisco Yus'MGI-SCI model to interpret humor in SMS text from the relevance perspective. The thesis begins by delimiting and classifying humor in SMS text. Humor in SMS text can be tentatively categorized into four types: general humor, cultural humor, linguistic humor and contextual humor. By probing into the four humor types, we can draw a conclusion that Relevance Theory has a strong explanation on interpreting humor as well as its applicability.