A Relevance-theoretic Approach To The Production Of Verbal Humor In Zhao Benshan's Comic Sketches

Humor exists in our daily life as a ubiquitous phenomenon. It can construct the pleasing atmosphere, improve interpersonal relationship as well as release intense pressure. Just because of ubiquity of humor, many scholars begin to make researches into humor from the perspectives of philosophy, psychology, sociology, and aesthetics and so on; others analyze humor from the semantic and rhetorical viewpoints, while systematic and scientific studies on humor from the aspect of pragmatics begin with the publishing of Relevance:Communication and Cognition written by Sperber&Wilson.Sperber&Wilson probe tentatively into communication from the cognitive perspective and hold that communication is the process of seeking relevance which is observed consciously by people during their communication. Relevance theory bases on two principles of relevance——cognitive principle and communicative principle. Cognitive principle of relevance is that human cognition tends to be geared to the maximization of relevance; communicative principle of relevance is that every act of ostensive communication communicates a presumption of its own optimal relevance. As the maximal relevance and optimal relevance denote different communicative meanings respectively during the communication, the disparity between these two is bound to result in the production of verbal humor.Based on the previous research findings of humor, this thesis employs relevance theory and adopts research methods of example illustration and classification to analyze the laughter-making mechanisms of verbal humor in a detailed and further way. Its research data comes from nineteen Zhao Benshan's in annual Spring Festival Gala since 1990. As one of major expression of humor, comic sketches are increasingly attracting more and more people's attention. Also as one of the representative of Chinese comic sketches, Zhao Benshan's comic sketches rank among Chinese highest Arts Center and win the universal applause from the nationwide audience by virtue of the fresh art style with the characteristics of ecological humor and earthy fragrance.This paper can be divided into five chapters. Chapter one introduces background, purpose, significance as well as the layout of this dissertation. Chapter two is literature review including previous research findings of humor and research status of Zhao Benshan's comic sketches. Chapter three presents theoretical framework, that is relevance theory, which includes the definition of relevance, two principles of relevance——cognitive principle and communicative principle. Chapter four starts with pragmatics, applies relevance theory and incongruity theory of humor into the laughter-making mechanisms of verbal humor in Zhao Benshan's comic sketches from the five aspects of phonetic, lexical, syntactic, rhetoric and pragmatic. The last chapter concludes this thesis and the main findings of this research.By the application of relevance theory into the study on verbal humor production in Zhao Benshan's comic sketches, this paper attempts to find the techniques of verbal humor production as well as the comprehension process of verbal humor in order to raise people's knowledge about Zhao's comic sketches to a cognitive level; to provide a new approach for better appreciation of verbal humor in Zhao Benshan's comic sketches; to supply a kind of new thought and theoretical basis for the comic sketches writers so as to create more and better works; to promote the enchantment of Chinese and display marrow of Chinese language art.