| With the rapid development of globalization and information technology, Chinese has no longer been unfamiliar with the oversea TV shows. Some western TV series, varieties of shows have even become an indispensable part of some Chinese audience‘s daily life, which occupies a large proportion in English programs, and they are also one of the most popular topics being researched.The introduction of overseas programs increases not only in quantity but also in species, which becomes increasingly diversified. Because of its characteristics, humor is closely related to American daily life, so that American sitcom and American talk show are very popular, especially among the young people.The analysis of the verbal humor in the show can make people realize how the humorous utterances are produced, improve the ability of making humorous effect through using language and taste the art charm of language. In addition, the show enjoyers can watch the talk show, analyze the process of the production of its humorous effect and, at the same time improve their understanding of American culture and event as well as the ability of using English language.The study of this topic applies Sperber and Wilson’s relevance theory, which is developed from Grice’s conversational implicature theory and cooperation theory, but is born from the perspective of cognitive science of language to expound the verbal communication. They hold that verbal communication is a cognitive process, which must experience the process through a rational inference, based on which the relevance principle is established, and they hope that the various pragmatic phenomena in the natural discourse can be explained by this principle.In 1986 Sperber and Wilson state in their book Relevance: Communication and Cognition, as a branch of communicative theory, its purpose is to make both the speaker and listener of the utterances identify well the intention hid in the conversation, so the ―mutual manifestness‖ definitely exists; Communication is a process of cognition: both sides of the verbal communication can cooperate tacitly, and they may understand each other‘s words well and their implied meaning, mainly there is a optimal cognitive model — relevance. Mostly relevance and optimal relevance are the two important concepts in relevance theory.Relevance is that when the hearer attempts to understand the utterance, he uses as little effort as possible to get the greatest contextual effect and the optimal relevance is that when the hearer tries to understand the words he pays effective effort to obtain adequate contextual effect. The speaker intentionally expresses his intention in an obscure way, which makes the hearer pay more effort to infer it. At beginning the hearer gets the most relevance and forms a context according to the new information the speaker gives, while in the hearer‘s mind there will be an expectancy which is the maximal relevant towards what the speaker says, then there comes the punch line which can be regarded as a turning point. The hearer finds himself misled and aroused the knowledge and expands the cognitive context to get the optimal relevance. In the process of getting the optimal relevance from the most relevance, the hearer pays more processing effort, which is rewarded by the humorous effect.The object of this researchis the humorous utterances in The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallonwhich is an influential talk show in American. This thesis is based on the domestic and foreign researches on the discourse humor and talk show.Foreign researches on humor mostly are based on the three classic western theories, namely the Superiority Theory, Incongruity Theory and Relief Theory and obtain substantial development.In recent years, many scholars have also made a new breakthrough in the field of humor research from the perspective of linguistics, such as semantic script theory and the general theory of verbal humor.Compared with foreign researches, domestic researches on verbal humor are still relatively weak. They focus more on the analysis of the characters, words, figures of speech, yet the psychology, modern linguistics such theories which have strong explanatory power haven‘t been fully applied to the researches on verbal humor. The study on talk show is quite one-sided, which concentrates onthe analysis of the turn-taking and characteristics of the hosts‘ words, the repetition of the hosts‘ utterancesand metal language, etc. The researches on the formationof verbal humor mostly are from the linguistic presupposition, discourse markers, cooperative principle, politeness principle such pragmatics aspects.The researches on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon are not only small in number, but also short of breakthrough points. Relevance theory develops from conversational implicature but has more explanatory power than it in many aspects. The contrast between maximal relevance and optimal relevance, the differences of cognitive context, the process of express-reasoning make the hearer pay more efforts during the process of understanding the discourse, through which the speaker intends to produce the humorous effects. This thesis will split and analyze the process of understanding discourse and try to find out the formation mechanism of humor in the framework of relevance theory. The conclusion that the relevance theory can help people understand the verbal humor better as well as improve the ability of using words to produce humorous effect in everyday life is drawn. In fact, only better understanding and mastering of formation mechanism of verbal humor can improve language learners‘ ability to appreciate and use the language. Furthermore, it can play an enlightening and guiding role in English teaching and English communication.Meanwhile this thesis takes The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon as an example to explore the production of humor through the application of Relevance Theory, which has a certain significance to applied linguistics and pragmatics researches. |
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