A Relevance Approach To The Cognitive Process Of Verbal Humor In Friends

Humor, as a distinctive way of human communication, has long received attention from a variety of disciplines, such as philosophy, aesthetics, anthropology, sociology, psychology, etc. Recent years have seen humor study in the domain of linguistics as language is a natural carrier of humor. However, it seems that the study of language itself cannot adequately account for how humor is produced and how it is appreciated by the addressee, which are the essential questions of pragmatics. With these questions, the current research attempts to unfold the cognitive process involved in humor production and interpretation. Sperber & Wilson's Relevance theory is adopted as the theoretic foundation for the general design of the research.Relevance theory, as a general theory for human cognition and communication, provides a new perspective on utterance understanding. According to RT, the process of humor understanding, like other forms of communication, is essentially a process searching for relevance. And it is this process which the communicator can predict and manipulate to some extent that provides good ground for humor. Through a case study of the American sitcom Friends and a detailed analysis of the sample humor in a qualitative approach, the cognitive process of verbal humor may be depicted. The thesis also probes into the failure of humor in cross-cultural settings. The notion of cognitive environment and mutual manifestness is found to be a good explanation for this problem.The thesis consists of five chapters. Chapter one outlines the background of the study, its theoretic foundation and its research purpose. Chapter two reviews the previous studies on humor, which lays a good ground for the present study. Chapter three describes the design of the research: its general approach and the method of data collection. Chapter four serves as the major focus of the study, which discusses the cognitive process of verbal humor from three aspects: humor production, humor interpretation and the failure in humor appreciation. The last chapter summarizes the major findings and limitations of the study with suggestions for further study in this area.Overall, this study is a tentative exploration of the cognitive process of verbal humor. It hopes to make some contribution to the study of humor and facilitate humor communication.