A Study Of Manufacturing Strategies Of Verbal Humor In Everyone Loves Raymond-a Relevance Perspective

With the rapid development of the society, the verbal humor has attracted more andmore attention. Verbal humor is a common linguistic phenomenon in our daily life, andwe can even say verbal humor is an art of human language. Especially for thesituational comedy, the successful use of the verbal humor decides the success of thesitcom. The proper humor can relax the tension, the atmosphere and the relationship.Therefore, the research of the manufacturing strategies is both realistic significance andpractical value. People have conducted many researches on humor from manyperspectives, such as psychology, sociology and anthropology. With the development ofthe linguist, people begin to research the verbal humor from the perspective ofsemantics, linguistics, etc. Recently, there are some researches from the perspective ofpragmatics, and moreover, there are also some researches from the relevance theory.However, there are few researches about the manufacturing strategies of verbal humor.In fact, the author thinks the most important is how to make the verbal humorunderstood as conveying the various emotions. And we can find the answer from therelevance theory. The author thinks it has more realistic value to explain themanufacturing strategies from the relevance theory.This thesis tries to conduct the research about what manufacturing strategies areused to produce the verbal humor in the sitcom Everyone Loves Raymond from theperspective of relevance. This thesis chooses forty verbal humor extracts from thefavorite sitcom. Based on the cognitive principle and the communication principle, theauthor conduct the research about how the verbal humor is interpreted from the hearers’perspective, and then analyze what manufacturing strategies are used to make the verbalhumor. For the method adopted in the thesis, there are the qualitative method and thequantitative method. Chapter one is a general introduction about the definition and theclassification of humor, the definition of the sitcom and the organization of the thesis.Chapter two is a literature review, and it makes a general conclusion about the humortheories---the relief theory, the incongruity theory, and the superiority theory, thesemantic research on humor, the pragmatic research on humor. Chapter three is the theoretical foundation, which introduces the relevance theory and puts forward a modelof humor interpretation. Chapter four is the research design, which will randomlycollect forty verbal humor examples from the sitcom and make a general divide usingthe manufacturing strategies----pragmatic strategies, linguistic strategies and rhetoricstrategies. Chapter five will make detailed analyses about the results of the research,and puts forward the research value. The conclusion chapter will display the creative ofthe thesis, the limitations of the thesis and put forward some suggestions for the furtherresearch.This thesis firstly uses the relevance theory to explain the manufacturing strategiesof the verbal humor in the sitcom Everyone Loves Raymond. And the research willcontribute to the understanding of the verbal humor, and the concrete use of therelevance theory.