On Humor Interpretation In The Big Bang Theory From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

Humor study in the linguistic field was started in the end of1970s and pragmaticstudies, represented by cooperative principle, made a huge contribution to it. However,it seemed that previous related pragmatic rules gradually lacked enough explanatorypower with the further development of humor study since almost all of them haveneglected that the essence of humor is communication and context. Therefore, a newtheory is required to make up for the deficiencies of them and exert a positiveinfluence on humor study. Relevance theory, put forward by Sperber and Wilson(1986)and enjoying the title of “cognitive pragmatics”, defined communication as a“ostensive-inferential” process. It is what the previous studies never referred to and itis also going to be the theoretical foundation for this paper. This article aims tointerpret the relevance theoretic basis, summarize the approaches of humor generationand contrast the relevance theory and cooperative principle in humor study and findout the superiority of relevance theory. Main methodologies adopted in this paper areliterature research method and synchronic contrast method. The examples are fromthe lines in theAmerican sitcom, The Big Bang Theory.In the first place, this thesis interpret the approaches of humor generation fromthree aspects after a detailed introduction of relevance theory and related humorresearch: contrast of informative intention and communicative intention, gap betweenmaximal relevance and optimal relevance as well as difference of cognitive contexts.Moreover, after finding out the deficiencies of cooperative principle in humorinterpretation, this thesis also summarize the superiority of relevance theory. First, ittaking communication as a “ostensive-inferential” process regards both speaker andhearer as research subjects so that a comprehensive generalization will be achieved inhumor study. Second, the introduction of “cognitive environment” can alsospecifically explain the humor causing by some factors which are not involved withviolation of cooperative principle, such as cultural distinction and understandingerrors. This paper takes the humorous lines in The Big Bang Theory as data, interpretsthe humor generation from the perspective of relevance theory and proves the greaterexplanatory power of it compared with cooperative principle. However, the contrastanalysis in this thesis is still quite superficial and it also needs a more systematic andcomprehensive framework. More efforts will be made in the future research and it isbelieved that relevance theoretic humor study will be complete and perfect soon.