A Study On The Production And Comprehension Of English Verbal Humor From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

Humor is the product of verbal activity in a certain communicative circumstance.As a typical type of communication, verbal humor reflects people’s art of usinglanguage and the wisdom of mankind and thus humor utterances are extremelypopular for their special communicative and aesthetic value. Western Scholars haveanalyzed humor from different angles and fields such as philosophy, psychology,sociology, linguistics and other disciplines. They have achieved ample research fruits.Chinese researchers put forward their own point of views in light of the researchfindings made by the western scholars. Relevant Theory (RT)-a new theory ofutterance comprehension proposed by Sperber and Wilson from the angle of cognitivepragmatics in1986, has drawn widespread concerns abroad and at home in recentyears. The previous studies on verbal humor with RT mainly center on the reasons ofhumor production and the interpretative process of humor. Since these studies arelimited in some aspects and thus are lack of comprehensive and systematicexplanation for the production and comprehension of verbal humor.On the basis of the research results related to the studies on humor with RT abroadand at home, this research chooses randomly19samples from five English humorcollections as the research data and employs the qualitative analysis as its researchmethod and RT as its theoretical framework to further explore the production andcomprehension of English verbal humor.The research questions of this thesis are as below:1) How is the humorous effect produced in the framework of RT?2) From theperspective of RT, what cognitive interpretative process do the readers undergo in thecomprehension of verbal humor?The research results show:1) In the framework of RT, the author and the reader make efforts jointly to formthe incongruity of the verbal humor that is made by the gap between the reader’s maximal relevance expectations and the author’s optimal relevance context based onthe mutually manifest cognitive context, and it is the incongruity that contributes tothe creation of humorous effect. The cognitive context in RT plays a crucial role inhumor generation, which can be illustrated from the two aspects: the reader’s oldcognitive context sets a premise for the production of the humorous effect, and theshifting to the author’s cognitive context realizes the humorous effect.2) RT holds that the comprehension of verbal humor is the cognitive process ofreaders’ seeking for optimal relevance on the basis of the mutually manifest cognitivecontext. In that process, readers undergo several procedures guided by the principle ofrelevance: forming initial cognitive context, encountering new information, inferringby making extra processing efforts and shifting to the author’s optimal relevancecontext. Readers obtain the author’s actual communicative intention ultimately afterthey undergo these cognitive procedures. The extra processing efforts made by readersare compensated in the manner of humorous effect.In a word, both the cognitive context and mutual manifestness do play importantroles in the production and comprehension of verbal humor.The results of this research not only provide references to the relevant researches inthe future but also make the readers have a further understanding about RT andEnglish verbal humor. Meanwhile, they supply both the audiences and authors ofhumor with some implications.