A Cognitive Study Of Verbal Humor From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

Humor, as a pervasive human communicative phenomenon, plays important roles in many aspects of human life. It can not only bring us pleasure and entertainment, it can also facilitate human relationships, maintain social relations between individuals, solve conflicts, enliven conversational atmosphere, or release mental pressure, etc. The nature of humor and the effect it brings about make the interpersonal communication a pleasant process to enjoy.There has been a very long history since theorists and scholars studied humor from different point of view. Here in this thesis, I make a brief introduction to three acknowledged classical theories: superiority theory, relief theory and incongruity-based theory and some representative studies on humor in linguistic field: The Semantic Script Theory of Humor, the General Theory of Verbal Humor and the relation between Grice's Cooperative Principle and humor. However, none of these theories is complete and universal. Comparing with those theories, Relevance Theory provides us with a new approach in illustrating humorous utterances.Relevance Theory developed by Sperber and Wilson (1986/1995), is the basis of cognitive pragmatics. Pragmatics is the study of the context-dependent aspects of utterance interpretation with its goal to show how linguistic meaning interacts with contextual assumptions during utterance communication. This thesis makes a tentative analysis of verbal humor understanding in the framework of Relevance Theory. It also tries to explain how humorous effects are achieved in verbal humor and how the cognitive mechanism work in the process of verbal humor interpretation.Relevance Theory is concerned with human communication and utterance comprehension. From a relevance-theoretic point of view, humor understanding is a cognitive process of searching for relevance. When understanding humorous utterance, among all the possible explanations, the hearer always chooses the most relevant and effort-saving utterance, because such explanation can satisfy the hearer's expectation of relevance to the greatest extent. During the process of humor interpretation, the hearer may first have in mind an assumption as initial context for the coming new information which is maximally relevant. Thus when the newly presented information is apparently in conflict with or unrelated to the initial context, the hearer is expected to expand the context with much additional processing effort according to the principle of optimal relevance, and add some new assumption to the initial context until the optimally relevant interpretation is obtained. As a result, it brings about enough cognitive effects and bears optimal relevance, thus humor is produced.From its first publish in 1978, now "Garfield" is the most widely syndicated comic strip in the world with about 263 million readers. Garfield has remained popular because he emerges as a figure with great sense of humor, which people like very much.This thesis aims to find out how a full interpretation of verbal humor in "Garfield" is achieved from the hearers' point of view. It applies the notions of optimal and maximal relevance, processing effort and the dynamic view of context to explaining how humor is understood. Further this thesis points out that the psychological stimulus caused by the contradiction between maximal and optimal relevance in utterances is the origin of humorous effect.We hope this thesis will help people to understand and appreciate humor in a more effective manner. Therefore, people can cultivate their sense of humor so as to facilitate their communication.