| Verbal humor is the essence of human language. Appropriate verbalhumor can not only produce laughter, but release tension, eliminateembarrassment and survive the predicament as well. In an utterance,correct interpretation of humor can make people laugh, meanwhile theinformation and communicative intension are also transmitted. The study on humor can be traced back to Plato, Aristotle and Cicero.Up to now, a great deal of research has been done from the viewpoint ofpsychology and sociology. It is since the publication of Relevance:Cognition and Communication that much systematic and pragmaticresearch has been done on verbal humor.Sperber and Wilson's Relevance Theory (1986/1995) is based on adefinition of relevance and two general principles: Cognitive Principleand Communicative Principle. The Cognitive Principle means that humancognition tends to be geared to the maximization of relevance while theCommunicative Principle indicates that utterances create presumptions ofoptimal relevance.Maximal relevance and optimal relevance are the two importantnotions concerned in Relevance Theory. Thus, the verbal humor derivesfrom the incongruity of maximal relevance and optimal relevance.According to Sperber and Wilson, relevance reflects the relationshipbetween newly-built information and the existing context. The relevanceis defined in the terms of cognitive effects and processing effort: (1) thegreater the cognitive effects, the greater the relevance;(2) the smaller theprocessing effort, the greater the relevance.This thesis, based on the fruitful studies of humor, attempts toinvestigate the laugh-making mechanisms and communicativemechanisms of English verbal humor from the perspective of RelevanceTheory.The laugh-making and interpretation of verbal humor is, in fact, anostensive-inferential process. In this process, the speaker often tends touse a direct or explicit way of expression. He wants to make the hearerconstruct the optimal relevance of the both sides' information in the leastprocessing effort. He will use some special and creative speech strategyand will add some seemingly irrelative information in the expression. Asindirect and accidentally irrelevant the verbal humor is, when interpretingthe utterance, the hearer will provide additional processing effort.Nonetheless, the extra processing effort implies additional effects. In thecomprehension of verbal humor, the extra processing effort is to berewarded by additional humorous effects, which lead to the pleasure ininterpreting the humor. This explains why people prefer to produce andenjoy humor even it is virtually more effort-demanding. |
