The Generation And Construal Mechanism Of English Verbal Humor In The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

Verbal communication is always the hot topic in pragmatics andcognitive-pragmatics. As a special form of verbal communication, humor reflects theart of language and owns its unique enchantment. The research on humor has gainedgreat popularity among the scholars at home and abroad from different fields throughthe ages. And the opinions and research findings have got constant improvement.They have conducted studies on humor from various academic fields which can insum and respectively come down to aesthetics, psychology and philosophy,sociology and rhetoric as well as linguistics. Among those, three traditional theories(the so-called relief theory, superiority theory, and incongruity theory) have made aprofound impact on the linguistic research of humor that emerged in the last thirtyyears of the twentieth century and has thrived till now. The incongruity theory takeseffect in particular, which points out the incongruity between a concept and thefactual reality which is detected and then resolved. Since humor is a complex thing inessence, the research including its definition and classification has not been unifiedyet.This thesis falls into the scope of cognitive-pragmatics. Based on the RelevanceTheory proposed by Sperber and Wilson, the author tries to make a tentative study onthe manufacturing strategies and interpretation mechanism of the English verbalhumor. With the foundation of cognitive principle and communicative principle ofRelevance Theory, the author intends to explore the English verbal humorsuccessively from the angle of the humorist and the recipient (hearer/reader) in orderto get a whole and clear picture of it. The cognitive context under the framework ofRelevance Theory not only includes the static context elements in the traditionalsense, but also is defined as a dynamic “psychological construct” which is vital to theutterance production and comprehension. The examples quoted by this thesis arecollected via multi-channels including the English verbal humor books and on-linejokes from the column of American Reader’s Digest as well as the humorous speeches from American talk shows, which ensure the quality and geo-authenticity ofthe linguistic data.Through the qualitative analysis of examples, the author testifies that thecontradiction between the optimal relevance and maximal relevance is the generalguideline for producing the humor. The specific strategies are divided into employingthe ambiguous words or sentence structure, referent, providing more or lesscontextual information to manipulate the cognitive context of the recipient and thedeviation of the regular logic. Meanwhile, the realization of the contradiction is thekey point of comprehension. The adjustment and selectivity of cognitive contextarmed with the lexical knowledge, encyclopedic knowledge, and logic knowledge isthe indispensable path to get humor and the construal of the implicature by virtue ofthe cognitive inference marks the success of humor comprehension. However, therelated knowledge absence of individual cognitive background hinders the availableinterpretation of the English verbal humor and the generation of the humorous effectto some extent, which the author primarily analyzes and illustrates from theperspective of the language context and socio-cultural context.This study is expected to make people have a better understanding of the essence ofhumor and its existence form as well as to enhance the percipient ability and creationcapacity of humor. Also, it is hoped to bring some benefits to the cross-culturalcommunication and enlighten the teaching of the English language.