From The Point Of View Of Relevance Theory And Principles Of Cooperation To Explore The Humor, The "friends"

Humor makes people laugh and keeps them in good mood; it can relieve stress and improve interpersonal relationship. Humorous language is a best part of human language, a representation of human wisdom. The cognitive interpretation of the understanding of humorous language, therefore, becomes one of the intensely researched areas of language study.The present thesis attempts to reveal the cognitive process of understanding humorous language by analyzing instances of humor in Friends, using Cooperative Principle and Relevance Theory as theoretical frameworks, and further, to compare the two theories in terms of their power and means in humor interpretation.Cooperative Principle and Relevance Theory are the two most powerful theories in revealing the cognitive process of humor understanding from a pragmatic perspective. Analyses of the humorous language used in Friends have further proved the explanatory power of these two theories in understanding humor. However, each has its own merits and limitations: Relevance Theory is more effective in analyzing rhetoric humor, while Cooperative Principle does a better job in explaining humor by speaking irrelevant utterance when the speakers are in bad moods. Therefore, the combination of these two theories provides the best framework for interpreting the cognitive process of humor understanding.