Pragmatic Study On The Interpretation Of Verbal Humor

Humor is a pervasive phenomenon that exists in all kinds of human communication. Humor has been studied through the ages. Since the 1970's, humor research has been flourishing in psychology, sociology, anthropology and also linguistics. Nowadays, the theories of pragmatics have sharpened our eyes and widened our horizons in humor studies. This paper, based on the previous fruitful studies of humor, attempts to make a contrastive investigation of verbal humor from the perspective of Cooperative Principle and Relevance Theory.The paper briefly introduces Cooperative Principle and its maxims—the maxim of Quantity, the maxim of Quality, the maxim of Relation and the maxim of Manner. Relevance Theory in this paper is illustrated in terms of the ostensive-inferential communication, contextual effects and processing effort, the definition of relevance and the principle of relevance, maximal relevance and optimal relevance respectively. The principle of relevance, which is the core of Relevance Theory, holds that "human cognition tends to be geared to the maximization of relevance" and "every act of ostensive communication communicates a presumption of its own optimal relevance." It reflects that human beings always tend to find relevant information in communication.Cooperative Principle focuses on the observation and violation of the maxims. These maxims, although lack adequate theoretical basis, are norms which speakers and hearers must know in order to communicate adequately. The principle of relevance, by contrast, is spontaneous and biologically rooted in human cognition. It is a generalization about ostensive-inferential communication. Communicators do not 'follow' the principle of relevance; and they could not violate it even if they wanted to. Cooperative Principle distinguishes clearly what is explicitly said and what is implicated. It does not give any explanation of explicit communication. Relevance Theory is intended to explain ostensive communication as whole, both explicit and implicit.Within Cooperative Principle, verbal humor is elicited by violating one or more of the four maxims. In Relevance Theory, the gap between the maximal relevance and the optimal relevance is the source of humorous stimulus, and it may also be regarded as the generating mechanism (or cognitive mechanism) of verbal humor. That is to say, a mental search for an optimally relevant interpretation covers the processing of verbal humor and the derivation of humorous effects. When the hearer's expectation of maximal relevance is extremely different from or incongruous with the speaker's actual utterance of optimal relevance, humorous effects occur. It proves to be reasonable and promising to account for verbal humor from a relevance-theoretic approach.