An Interpretation Of English Puns From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory In The Big Bang Theory

Relevance Theory was first proposed by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson in 1986. As a cognitive theory of communication, Relevance Theory aims to account for how the hearer infers the speaker’s intended meaning or communicative intention. Pun is one of the most prominent rhetoric figures existing in American situation comedies. Numerous researchers and scholars have devoted themselves to studying English puns in advertisements in the perspective of Relevance Theory; however, few have explored the possible mechanism of interpreting English puns used in American sitcoms from the perspective of Relevance Theory.In order to fill up this gap, this thesis aims to find out the possible interpretation of English puns and the interpretation processes of three types of English puns which are all collected in the American sitcom the Big Bang Theory in order to achieve optimal relevance from the perspective of Relevance Theory. The research questions addressed in this thesis are:1) What is the possible mechanism of interpreting English puns? 2) What is the process of interpreting homophonic puns in order to achieve optimal relevance? 3) What is the process of interpreting homographic puns with Ostensive-inferential Model in order to achieve optimal relevance? 4) What is the process of interpreting asteismus puns with Code Model in order to achieve optimal relevance?The research materials used in this thesis are English puns from the Big Bang Theory which can be categorized into three types:homophonic puns, homographic puns and asteismus puns. According to the definitions of three types of puns, there are 13 homophonic puns,39 homographic puns and 14 asteismus puns in the sitcom the Big Bang Theory. The data are analyzed qualitatively, exploring the general mechanism of English puns and the processes of interpreting three types of English puns from the perspective of the Relevance Theory. Detailed analysis of qualitative research yields the following findings:Firstly, it is found that the interpretation process of English puns has a general mechanism of three steps in the Big Bang Theory:disambiguation, enrichment, and association. When interpreting puns in the Big Bang Theory, disambiguation means to figure out the interpretation which can satisfy the speaker’s expectation of relevance rather than explore the most overt one. Enrichment means the process that the hearer takes advantage of the contextual information to enrich the meaning during the process of searching for interpretation of optimal relevance. Association means the process that the hearer needs to keep association with the given context and his or her encyclopedia knowledge to get access to the covert meaning which meets the expectation of speaker.Secondly, for different types of English puns, the hearer achieves the presumed optimal relevance through different ways. Homophonic puns take advantages of some special words that sound similar but are not synonymous. The process of interpreting homophonic puns has two steps. When the homophonic pun is occurred to the hearer, he or she will get the literal meaning and obtain the first interpretation. In accordance with the principle of relevance, the hearer should take advantage of his or her encyclopedia knowledge to associate with another homophonous word and obtain the final interpretation.Thirdly, homographic puns exploit words that are pronounced or spelt the same but have different meanings. Ostensive-inferential Model means the process that the speaker gives an ostensive language stimulus for the purpose of fulfilling his or her informative intention and communicative intention, while the hearer is to infer the speaker’s communicative intention. The process of interpreting homographic puns can be divided into two parts:ostension and inference. The hearer firstly gets the ostensive stimulus and has the first interpretation. However through some processing efforts, the hearer will obtain some contextual effects to infer the second interpretation and then he or she will achieve the optimal relevance.Fourthly, asteismus puns refer to one’s misunderstanding of the meaning of a word deliberately or unintentionally. Code Model means that the encoder sends the signal and the decoder receives the signal in order to achieve communicative intention. The process of interpreting asteismus puns can be divided into two parts:to the encoder and to the decoder. When the decoder does not receive or understand the signal sent by the encoder successfully, another meaning is produced by the decoder, and then asteismus puns are produced by the contradictions between the encoder’s utterance and the decoder’s understanding.According to the findings, this thesis makes some pedagogical implications mainly for the English teachers and learners. To the English teachers, they should be aware of the importance of English puns and pay attention to the teaching of English puns in order to arouse their interests and motivation in English. To the English learners, they should understand that English puns can not only be recognized from the linguistic form, but also context plays an important role in interpreting the English puns. Furthermore, English learners should flexibly take advantage of the Relevance Theory to solve many problems concerning the understanding of English puns in American sitcoms and make the overall interpretation of English puns successfully.