Ambiguity In Verbal Humor From The View Of Relevance Theory

Sperber and Wilson's Relevance Theory is used as the theoretical framework of this thesis in order to explore the process of the generation and cognitive understanding of verbal humors. Relevance Theory is based on the definition of relevance and two principles. These two principles are the cognitive principle and the communicative principle. Sperber and Wilson think that people's verbal communication is the process of seeking for relevance. But the problem is how as a recipient, the listener or reader of the humors finds the relevance, and thus feels the humorous effects. That is just the focus of the paper. From the perspective of Relevance Theory, the comprehension of humors is a cognitive process of seeking for relevance for the listener. In this process, the principle of relevance plays a guiding role. The maximal relevance and the optimal relevance are two important concepts in the Relevance Theory, and the gap between the maximal relevance and the optimal relevance acts as the trigger of the humorous effects..By analyzing humors in "Readers", we believe that the understanding process of humor is as follows: the listener, according to the initial context of the discourse, first makes the maximal relevance expectation with least effort. However, with the progress of the discourse, the listener may feel the maximal relevance expectation seems to be irrelevant to the new information. Driven by seeking for the relevance, the listener thinks this irrelevance is apparent and expands the context to further infer the attitude and the meaning that the speaker intends to convey. Extra effort can bring about additional contextual effects. The listener discovers the optimal relevance of the new information and gets humorous effects. Therefore, the understanding of humor can be said to be the process, during which the listener finds relevance from the utterance that originally seems to be irrelevant. However, it is just the gap between the maximal relevance and the optimal relevance that results in the humorous effects. And this gap can be influenced by many factors. Ambiguity is one of the main factors. This thesis aims to analyze the gap from phonological ambiguity, lexical ambiguity, cultural ambiguity, syntactic ambiguity and the omission of information, and tries to find out human cognitive understanding mechanism, in order to make readers better understand verbal humors.The innovation of this thesis is to study verbal humors from the perspective of the gap between the maximal relevance and the optimal relevance, which is a new attempt. It can demonstrate Relevance Theory has the potent explanatory power and researchers may be inspired to study verbal humors from this angle.