A Study On The Cognitive Mechanism Of Verbal Humor From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

As a special form of human communication,humor plays a very important part in our daily life and social communication and is an indispensable element in our everyday communication.After reviewing some previous studies made by scholars,we can find that laying stress on language fails to get the satisfactory answer.So it is necessary to make a further study on verbal humor to find out a more reasonable explanation.Relevance Theory proposed by Sperber and Wilson provides a new angle for the study on verbal humor.And it is a theory of pragmatics concerning communication and cognition.From a relevance-theoretic point of view,humor interpretation is a cognitive process of searching for relevance.The principle of relevance plays a guiding role in the process.In the process of verbal humor communication,the hearer finds out the incongruity of utterance.Then the hearer driven by the expectation of relevance further infers implicit meanings or real attitudes in the speaker's utterance.Verbal humor understanding is thus a process in which the hearer finds “relevance” in what seems “irrelevant”.The interpretation of verbal humor can be seen as a dynamic process on the basis of context.According to Sperber and Wilson,cognitive context is regarded as a psychological construct,i.e.a series of assumption existing in mankind's brain,which is different from the traditional context.Their theory is helpful for analyzing communicators' psychological states and cognitive process from dynamic perspective.The thesis consists of six parts.The first part offers a general introduction of the research including the background,the purpose and significance.The main body contains four chapters.Chapter One presents literature review: the introduction of humor including definition,classification and theories of humor,an overview of the relevant studies on verbal humor at home and abroad from the perspective of RT and cognitive context.Chapter Two isthe theoretical framework of the thesis and introduces some key concepts of RT including relevance,relevance principle,ostensive-inferential model and cognitive context.Chapter Three analyzes the cognitive mechanism of verbal humor in terms of relevance principle,ostensive-inferential model and cognitive context based on some analyses of verbal humors,and a cognitive process of verbal humor is presented in the form of flow chart.The Chapter Four explores the effect of pragmatic elements of cognitive context on the interpretation of verbal humor.The final part gives a summarization of the main viewpoints in the thesis.The interpretation of verbal humor is a cognitive process,and Relevance Theory and cognitive context can properly explain the meaning of verbal humor.My research is intended to explore the mechanism of humor's production and understanding based on the forefathers' achievements from the perspective of the cognitive context theory of relevance theory.