A Relevance-Pragmatic Inquiry Into Verbal Humor In Humor Columns Of Reader’s Digest

Verbal humor is a pervasive phenomenon in human communication. In our daily life, various kinds of humor can be found which play an irreplaceable role in our social communication. It has attracted the attention of many researchers in different fields such as philosophy, aesthetics, psychology, sociology and linguistics. Up to now, the study on humor has developed as an interdisciplinary subject connected with a wide range of learning. The appearance of relevance theory makes the establishment of cognitive pragmatics and its pluralistic theoretical background provide us with a completely new approach to the study of verbal humor. This thesis, based on the relevance theory, has conducted a linguistic-pragmatic study of the verbal humor in Reader’s Digest.In the thesis, the author employs some concrete examples from Reader’s Digest to analyze the production and comprehension of humorous utterance from a cognitive perspective. Data analysis begins with what the joke is about, then the linguistic description and the pragmatic interpretation, and lastly the discovering of the humorous effect. While trying to summarize the pragmatic features of humorous utterances in this journal, it revisits the explanatory power of the application of Relevance Theory.Sperber and Wilson’s Relevance Theory is actually based on a definition of relevance and two general principles:the Cognitive Principle and the Communicative Principle. According to Relevance Theory, the search for an optimally relevant interpretation covers the processing of verbal humor understanding and the derivation of humorous effects. When the hearer’s expectation of maximal relevance is extremely different from the speaker’s utterance of optimal relevance, humorous effects accompanied by misunderstanding occur. As verbal humor involves an element of indirectness or accidental irrelevance, the interpretation of humorous utterances calls for extra processing effort, which is to be offset by additional humorous effects.In brief, the study of verbal humor from a pragmatics perspective is of great practical value, making the research on humor go forward to a new broadened horizon.