Pragmatic Interpretation Of Verbal Ironic Humor And Its Production: A Relevance Theory Perspective

Humor is everywhere in our daily life and language humor is a usual phenomenon in human communication. It is an interdisciplinary subject connected with a wide range of learning. Up to now, a great deal of research has been done from the viewpoint of psychology and sociology. But in pragmatics, due attention has not been paid to verbal humor, not to mention verbal ironic humor. This paper, based on ? the fruitful studies of humor, attempts to investigate the interpretation of English verbal ironic humor from the perspective of Relevance Theory, a cognitive theory first developed by Sperber and Wilson.Relevance Theory analyzes ironic humor interpretation with a new perspective. As to the relevance-theoretic interpretation of verbal ironic humor, ostensive-inferential mode and cognitive environment can give a good explanation. Under Relevance Theory, the comprehension procedures of verbal ironic humor are for audience to infer from communicator's ostensive information and for communicator to affect audience's cognitive environment. For the production of verbal ironic humor, the hypotheses Relevance Theory proposes can also help better explain in what situation verbal ironic humor may be produced, or what results in the production of verbal ironic humor. Accepting the hypotheses proposed by Relevance Theory, the thesis holds that verbal ironic humor will appear in four situations:contradiction of contexts; extra processing effort to achieve humorous effects;mismatch in memory and perceptual system; conflict between maximal relevance andoptimal relevance.As a special kind of humor, verbal ironic humor is never produced merely for thesake of amusement but often to implicitly perform some communicative functions notachievable by explicit expressions, such as: criticizing and exposing evils;counter-attacking or self-defending to stand on one's dignity; attacking or ridiculing,apart from its capability of just laughter-making. The thesis argues that the usage ofcovert intention instead of overt one in verbal ironic humor helps a lot in producingthe above communicative functions.