Interpretation Of Humor With Relevance Theory

Humor is a ubiquitous phenomenon, and the history of humor research is long and rich. For centuries, scholars from various disciplines have been working on humor. Their researches have been fruitful and undoubtedly shed significant light on many aspects of humor ranging from its formation, its essence, its features, to the topics concerned in humor. However, humor is so multifaceted that all those findings seem to have little acknowledged agreement on its nature or even its definition.By reviewing the previous theories and researches, we find that most studies concerning humor are focused on the generation of incongruous element on the basis of the incongruity theory. However, a mere discussion on the perception of the incongruous element and the interpretation of the humorous utterances are conducted. RT provides a new theoretic framework for humor analysis.The present thesis is a tentative exploration into the cognitive process of humor understanding under the framework of RT. It first attempts to answer the question of how the recipient of humor seeks relevance of the humorous utterance and ultimately perceives the irrelevance as relevance. This thesis, by adopting qualitative methodology and carrying out a number of data analyses, finds out that The communicative principle of relevance plays an essentially guiding role in the process of humor understanding. From the relevance-theoretic perspective, humor understanding is a cognitive process of searching for optimal relevance. By means of data analysis, the process can be depicted as follows:the hearer, in humorous communication, finds out first that the utterance is irrelevant or incongruous, which is out of his/her expectation. Driven by the expectation of relevance, he assumes that this irrelevance or incongruity is apparent and further infers implicit meanings or attitudes. More efforts generate more effects. At this moment, a humorous interpretation of the utterance is obtained. Humor understanding is thus a process in which the hearer finds relevance in what seems irrelevance.