A Relevance-Theoretic Study Of English Verbal Humor

Humor, especially verbal humor, is a language phenomenon that exists in every corner of human life, and therefore, since the ancient Greek times, it has always been attracting the interest of scholars. However, for a long time, most of the studies focused on "What's the essence of humor?" There has been many classical theories concerning humor such as the incongruity theory, the superiority theory and the relief theory and so on. However, after many years'of practice, more and more scholars begin to realize the shortcomings of these classical theories. In 1986, the emergence of the Relevance Theory, which was proposed by Sperber & Wilson, attracted the attention of many scholars. In this thesis, with the guidance of the Relevance Theory, the author will make a systematic study on English verbal humor.The analysis of language should not be simply limited to the grammatical analysis and the elaboration of words, but a complex cognitive process of psychology. Likely, the realization of English verbal humor is also a cognitive process, an ostensive-inferential process, so it is necessary for us to study verbal humor from the cognitive point of view. As an inferential theory of communication, the Relevance Theory which was put forward by Sperber and Wilson in 1986 aims to explain how the audience infers the communicator's intended meaning. The Relevance Theory presents two kinds of relevance:maximal relevance and optimal relevance, with the difference between them as an important part of it. Maximal relevance means that the addressee gets the greatest contextual effects for the smallest processing effort, while optimal relevance indicates that the addressee gets enough contextual effects at no gratuitous effort. And the Relevance Theory also presents two principles:cognitive principle (i.e. human cognition tends to be geared to the maximization of relevance) and communicative principle (i.e., every act of ostensive communication communicates a presumption of its own optimal relevance). This thesis, based on the relevance theory (RT) proposed by Sperber and Wilson, attempts to investigate the production mechanisms of English verbal humor, the ways to understanding English and the cognitive process of English verbal humor from the perspective of cognitive pragmatics. The conclusion is made in the end, that is, the Relevance Theory plays such an important and effective role in analyzing humor producing mechanism that helps us understand English verbal humor better.On the one hand, this study has implications in the exploration into humor as well as the research on the Relevance theory, especially that on pragmatics. On the other hand, it can be applied to the teaching process to improve the teaching quality.