An Interpretation Of Verbal Humor From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

Humor is a character and a way of communication peculiar to human beings. In our daily life, various types of humor can be found which play an irreplaceable role in our social life. It has attracted the attention of many researchers in many fields such as philosophy, aesthetics, physiology, psychology, sociology and linguistics. The creation and the expression of humor depend on language in quite many cases. So among all types of humor, verbal humor is one that we find most easily in everyday life. To facilitate the analysis, the object of the study in this thesis paper only concentrates on the phenomenon of verbal humor. The birth of relevance theory in the 1980s makes the establishment of cognitive pragmatics and its pluralistic theoretical background provides us with a completely new scientific viewpoint for the study of verbal humor. So it is decided that the theoretical basis of this paper is relevance theory and the object is verbal humor.More and more people are trying to employ relevance theory to study verbal humor. There is a long way for all these researchers to go. At present, there are still some problems that need more systematic study. In my opinion, two problem are very important but have not been analyzed very well. One is from the perspective of relevance theory how can the humor effect be realized successfully? The other is on the base of humor appreciation analysis, what strategy and specific language skills make humor effect generate?The introduction part has three points. The first point is the background of the thesis. The second is the objectives of the thesis and the last one is the general structure of the thesis.Chapter one is the literature review of humor. There are three parts. In the first part we present the nature of humor, including its definition and essential elements. The second part is the classification of humor. In the last part we review the general theories about humor. In traditional fields there are three major theories--superiority theory, release theory and incongruity theory. Some researchers also made study from sociology perspective. At last we summarize the present humor study in linguistic field. There are researches mainly from syntactic, semantic and pragmatics.Chapter two is the framework of our theoretical basis, relevance theory. We present it from three important aspects. Firstly we introduce view on communication of relevance theory. Secondly we introduce cognitive context, which is different from context in traditional pragmatics. Finally we explain knowledge about relevance.Chapter three and chapter four are the main parts of the thesis. Chapter three is on the appreciation of verbal humor from the perspective of relevance theory. There are two parts. The first part generally analyzes the process of humor appreciation. In relevance theory, communication is a cognitive activity. In communication, people's cognitive tendency is to look for most contextual effect with least processing effort. Influenced by the cognitive tendency, in the first phase of appreciation the communicator and the audience construct an interpretation to the utterance and then find the failure of communication. Punch line makes them choose cognitive context again to construct the proper interpretation. As a result the humor effect is realized. In the second parts, we detail the sources of humor effect. There are three sources of the effects from the perspective of relevance theory. They are gap between maximal relevance and optimal relevance, realization of covert intention and change of cognitive context. They are interpreted with analyzing some samples. Chapter four is the study on strategy and language skills to produce verbal humor. There are also two parts. In the first part we give the basic strategy. The humorists should conceal communicative intention, give the utterance without optimal relevance and conduct them to make wrong relevance. In the second part we summarize some language skills frequently used. We will analyze some samples from phonological semantic, rhetorical and pragmatic perspective.The last part is the conclusion, in which the content of the thesis is summarized and the significance and the shortcoming are presented.