An Adaptation-Relevance Study On Pun In Verbal Communication

As an intelligent and witty language phenomenon, pun exists in every corner of life, playing a decisive role in human's daily communication. In certain context, in order to effectively and implicitly express thoughts and emotions, people make one word or phrase conveying two different things such as different thoughts, different concepts and different emotions and so on by the means of homonym and polesemy. In this way, the verbal expression carries has a double meaning, namely surface meaning and implied meaning, but the latter meaning is what the speaker wants to express exactly. Therefore, pun is produced. In virtue of its significance and university, it draws more and more scholars' attentions and attempts to their efforts explain this phenomenon from different approaches. Regardless of their achievements, previous studies still fail to achieve desirable and satisfying effects. Therefore, the essential process of pun use remains to be explored further.In the view of this, cognitive linguist proposes the adaptation-relevance theory based on the integration of merits of the relevance theory put forward by Sperber&Wilson and the adaptation theory by Verschuren. This theory provides us a more comprehensive pattern of verbal communication. The main content of the theory is as follows:there are two aspects in language use, namely language production and language interpretation. In the process of language use, both the speaker and the hearer need to make certain relevance presumption adapting to. the context. Therefore, the process of adaptation-relevance is genuinely a dynamic inter-adaptation between the contextual correlates and a linguistic structure, which helps the speaker make the optimal relevance and finally choose the linguistic forms or communicative strategies, and on the other hand, helps the hearer make choices of relevance-orientation and fix the inferential results conforming to the speaker's communication intention. By tentatively employing this theory to analyze pun in verbal communication, the aim of the paper is to further the exploration of the essential process of the production and interpretation of pun. And it aims to provide a new approach and reference to pun.This paper explores the whole process of pun use and the realization of functions of pun, and analyzes that the production and interpretation of pun in verbal communication is the process of adapting to various contexts and making choices based on the optimal relevance, and meanwhile is the process of strategy-choosing. This paper firstly introduces the definition from different sources and its features, and then reviews the literatures that study puns from the rhetorical, semantic, pragmatic or cognitive point of view, pointing out their contributions and shortcomings. After that we introduce the adaptation-relevance theory in detail, including its backgrounds, development and the main points.The main body of this paper is to apply the adaptation-relevance theory to analyze the collected instances of pun with the qualitative and documentary methods, and essentially displays pun as a dynamic process of adapting to various context and making constant choices on the basis of the optimal relevance to people from five aspects. Besides, it elaborates in detail that pun use is also a process of strategy-choosing, i.e., using pun in order to retort decently, using pun in order to bitterly satire, using pun to tactfully change the subject, using pun to express ideas euphemistically and using pun to attract attention. In virtue of the above analysis, this paper is beneficial for people not only to catch the real process of pun use but also more deeply understand the motivations of pun's intended achievement and the reasons of pun occurring frequently.Finally, the paper points out some limitations of the study and gives some suggestions for further studies.In a word, this research analyzes the process of pun use from the adaptation-relevance theory, which is regarded as a new trial of both theoretical and practical significant. Based on the theory, this research develops the study of pun and also proves the applicability and explanatory force of adaptation-relevance model; from the practical view, people can be familiar with this kind of communicative strategy and have a better usage of pun in order to achieve our communicative intention. What's more, adaptation-relevance theory can be applied to analyze the whole process of the other language phenomena.