A Study Of Verbal Humor In Cross Talk From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

Cross talk, as a treasure of national and traditional culture, stands for traditional verbal humor of Chinese people. Mr. Hou Baolin, who is reputated as the language master, states that cross talk is both a language art and a humorous art. It is through the tying and revealing of packages that cross talk achieves the goal of amusing its listeners and makes people instructed, inspired and enlightened as well. Cross talk is seldom touched by foreign researchers on account of its uniqueness to Chinese culture. However, it has been a long time since domestic researchers paid attention to cross talk for the first time, the vast majority of whom were focused on cross talk itself covering its origin and classifications, four elementary skills and the techniques for constructing packages etc. It was not until the1960s that scholars began to deal with humorous language in cross talk from the perspective of rhetoric.Relevance Theory, a cognitive pragmatic theory proposed by Sperber and Wilson in their joint works titled Relevance:Communication and Cognition, exerts significant influence on western pragmatic circles. Ever since it was proposed, Relevance Theory has been attracting close attention of scholars and has been widely used in different fields including humor studies; whereas, very few have applied it to the study of verbal humor revealed in Chinese cross talk. Therefore, a tentative research is conducted in this thesis, probing into its production and comprehension in the light of Relevance Theory.The present study centers on the following questions:①why is cross talk laughable? As if often the case, we burst out laughing when appreciating cross talk but seldom reflect on the reason. This thesis attempts to investigate the reasons for people’s laughter when listening to cross talk under the framework of Relevance Theory;②cross talk is aimed to amuse its listeners, the main techniques for which are dealt with from the perspectives of phonology, lexicon, syntax and semantics;③what cognitive steps does the listeners go through in the process of appreciating verbal humor in cross talk? The comprehension process is analyzed in this thesis on the basis of Relevance Theory;④The success of communication is never guaranteed, likewise, humorous communication in cross talk is no exception. What are the barriers to appreciation of cross talk humor? The present study shows that Relevance Theory, governing the production and comprehension of verbal humor in cross talk, has a good explanatory power and applicability to cross talk humor. The maximally relevant interpretation and optimally relevant interpretation of utterances are inferred under the guidance of the cognitive and communicative principles of Relevance Theory. It is contrast effect between maximal relevance and optimal relevance that accounts for the production of cross talk humor. On the part of the listeners, comprehension of verbal humor in cross talk, in essence, is a process of context-selection and relevance-seeking with processing effort, during which8cognitive steps in all are involved in.It is of positive significance in both theory and practice to apply a western linguistic theory to a linguistic phenomenon with Chinese characteristics. For one thing, the explanatory power of Relevance Theory can be further tested; for another, we can definitely get a better understanding of cross talk through the investigation on the production and comprehension of its verbal humor so as to make useful contributions to carrying forward our traditional culture. Last but not least, the present study is a great help in creating and appreciating cross talk items and provides foreigners with an access to Chinese culture as well.