| Humor is a most important part in all cultures and languages and an all-encompassing phenomenon in human communication. Studies on humor and what makes people laugh have been traced from Plato, Aristotle and Cicero, through Hume and Kant to the recent Bergson and Freud. Most works on humor tend to be approached from physiological, psychological, anthropological and sociological aspects. However, a systematic linguistic research on humor has not been prosperous until Raskin wrote his book Semantic Mechanisms of Humor. This paper intends to discuss humor (especially verbal humor) within the aspect of linguistics, including semantic, pragmatic, and mainly relevance-theoretic approach.Chapter I deals with a comprehensive review of literature of humor research. Even though it is very intricate to give a proper definition of humor, there are still many researchers trying to do it. Among them, Raskin's humor act which is divided into three aspects makes a linguistic investigation in verbal humor. In addition, three main theories of humor (superior theories, incongruity theory and release theory) are briefly introduced. The three theories supplement each other rather than contradict. Incongruity theory has been used much as examples in linguistic study of verbal humor. Besides, I also review the types of humor. Researchers have given many different classifications based on different standards and according to different purposes. Linguistic types humor is my concern. The Semantic Script Theory of Humor by Raskin is the main topic in Chapter II. The SSTH models the humorous competence of an idealized speaker or hearer. "Script" is the most basic concept in the SSTH, which means a cognitive structure internalized by the native speaker and it represents the native speaker's knowledge of a small part of the world. The SSTH consists of two components: the lexicon and the combinational rules. Through his main hypothesis of the SSTH, Raskin provides two important concepts in analyzing verbal humor: script overlap and script oppositeness. Both of them can account for humor separately, but it is better to combine them for the analyzing of humor. Many researchers consider the SSTH as a unifying theoretical and formal basis for linguistic research of humor.The SSTH itself indeed provides us a right way to start the linguistic study of humor, however, due to the limitation of semantics, it can not explain the relation between verbal humor and context. Therefore, Chapter III focuses on the pragmatic account of humor. In particular, I choose the Grice's cooperative principle to interpret humor. It is not enough to explain humor only by such proposition as humor is produced by violating the maxims. Then Raskin puts forward his cooperative principle for the non-bona-fide communication mode of joking, which claims that the hearer perceives the intention of the speaker as an attempt to make him laugh. On the theoretical basis of Grice's CP, Raskin's non-bona-fide theory is an appropriate substitute of the CP theory. Chapter IV is the main part of this paper. Sperber and Wilson's Relevance Theory is a pragmatic theory of human communication. In this paper it is illustrated in terms of the code model and the inferential model, ostensive-inferential communication, contextual effects and processing effort, the definition of relevance and the principle of relevance respectively. The principle of relevance, which is the core of the RT, holds that "Human cognition tends to be geared to the maximization of relevance" and "Every act of ostensive communication communicates a presumption of its own optimal relevance." It reflects that human beings always tend to find relevant information in communication. According to Sperber and Wilson, the principle of relevance is always followed by people in uttering and understanding speech, and can be applied to the interpretation of all types of discourse. As to the relevance-theoretic account of verbal humor, there always exist two contrary things such as: old information and newly-p...
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