Analysis Of Cold Joke Inference Mechanism Based On Relevance Theory

Humor,which can be reflected in any language and culture,plays a vital role in people's communication.As a special new kind of humor,cold jokes have been popular in recent years.Cold joke is told or showed for pleasant and relaxed communication atmosphere in daily life.It also indicates humor and wit of someone who tells a cold joke(“speaker” or “writer” in this paper).Most of the existing studies on cold joke just explain the linguistic features from the perspective of pragmatics and cognition,or study the physical changes of receivers caused by cold jokes from psychological angle.However,there is still no comprehensive definition about cold joke.What does “cold” refer to? Where is “cold” from? To solve these questions,it is urgent to make out the inference process or steps of cold joke receivers that few scholars have focused on.On the contrary,the research is very likely to supplement relevant theories to some extent.Before the analysis of inference process,it should be solved primarily that what the definition of cold joke is.And next,in order to make the recording more convenient,different types of written Chinese cold jokes are selected as subjects in this papers.The results will give support for the further study of “cold”,including how “cold” is embodied and why it is generated.With the view of questions above,the author concludes the definition of cold joke and records readers' inference course by interviewing 50 readers.Readers usually have different cognition towards cold jokes because of different individual experience.Accordingly,questionnaire 1 is designed to extract texts that most readers think are cold jokes.And questionnaire 2 will help conclude readers' criteria for judging a cold joke,find out where and why readers feel cold when finish reading,and estimate the average time it takes to read a cold joke.Thus,a practical basis is simultaneously given for analysis.The author divides the respondents into groups of 20 and 30 to ensure the reliability of the data.It is found that the plots of cold joke are circuitous with an ending that is different from conventional thinking.It takes a few seconds to understand during which readers need to read at least twice as a result of interesting,helpless,and even boring feeling.Reading a cold joke takes more time than a hot one.During the extended time,readers first make contextual inference under the guidance of maximal relevance,which is a directional trial and error,so it takes time but not much.When the cold laughing point cannot be triggered,readers rethink the content of the relevant discourse.According to the similarity or relevancy,they finally find the optimal relevance of the text and trigger the cold laughing point through the second contextual assumption inference.There are four reasons why these readers feel “cold” when reading these texts: the textual characteristics,the difference between maximal relevance and optimal relevance,change of contexts,and the tortuousness of inference.Moreover,the research result of such communicative activity,reading cold jokes,can make further supplement for Relevance Theory.The inference during reading a cold joke indicates that maximal relevance is actually weak relevance on communicative principle.And getting optimal relevance under the cold laughing point requires more cognitive effort than maximal relevance.