A Study Of Verbal Humor In Sitcoms From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

As a unique character and communicative way to human being,humor is a charming art form and pervasively exists in people's daily social life.It plays an important role in many aspects,such as in easing the atmosphere and in improving interpersonal relationship.For a long time,on the basis of three traditional humor theories,namely the Superiority Theory,the Relief Theory and the Incongruity Theory,humor researches have involved various fields,such as psychology,sociology,anthropology,and presented the characteristics of pluralism,multidisciplinary nature and application.The linguistic tendency of humor research became obvious from the1970 s,from when scholars at home and abroad started to concentrate on the interpretation of verbal humor from the perspectives of semantics,pragmatics and cognitive linguistics.Based on pragmatics,the Relevance Theory put forward by Sperber and Wilson is regarded as a general theory about human being's cognition and communication.The theory sheds new light on elucidating many language phenomena.From the standpoint of Relevance Theory,the interpretation of verbal humor being the same as other utterances,involves a cognitive process of the hearer,in which he/she tries to search for relevance.Due to the contextual assumptions between the speaker and the hearer not being totally manifested to each other,so the following contrast between the optimal relevance and the maximal relevance gives rise to humorous effects.Considering that Relevance Theory may show strong explanatory power in interpreting verbal humor from the cognitive perspective,the current thesis determines to take Relevance Theory as the framework.As a carrier of conveying the art of verbal humor,sitcoms are widely welcomed by people.Scholars have studied the verbal humor in many sitcoms from different linguistic perspectives and have achieved gratifying results.Based on the previous studies,this paper finds that few researches analyze the verbal humor in the American family sitcom Good Luck Charlie from the perspective of Relevance Theory.In addition,there are still few studies analyzing the illocutionary acts of humorous utterances on the basis of appreciating verbal humor in this sitcom.Therefore,thisstudy taking Relevance Theory as the theoretical framework,decides to select the popular sitcom Good Luck Charlie as the corpus source and part of the humorous dialogues in the first three seasons as the research object.Furthermore,the study attempts to adopt the qualitative method to explore the production and interpretation of verbal humor in this sitcom from the cognitive perspective.Guided by the framework of Relevance Theory,this paper learns from predecessors' researches and adopts the general procedure of interpreting verbal humor: the hearer seeks the maximal relevance according to the speaker's ostensive discourses;the hearer finds that the maximal relevance is inconsistent with the context,from which some conflicts arise accordingly;the hearer makes greater cognitive efforts to adjust the cognitive context;the hearer obtains the optimally relevant interpretation of humorous utterances.According to the humorous strategies adopted by the speaker in humorous dialogues,the study classifies the humorous utterances in the sitcom into lexical humor,rhetorical humor and pragmatic humor,and analyses some specific examples within each category.It is found that the general procedure of verbal humor interpretation can clearly explain people's cognitive mechanism in the generation and comprehension of verbal humor.Furthermore,this thesis finds that three types of verbal humor mainly express many illocutionary acts through syntactic structures and emotional meanings,such as irony,appreciation,shirking responsibility and shifting topics.