A Research On Verbal Humor From The Perspective Of The Relevance Theory

In this paper, a cognitive approach to humor is adopted within the framework of the Relevance Theory developed by Sperber and Wilson (1986,1995).Humor, especially verbal humor, is a language phenomenon that exists in every corner of human life, and therefore, since the ancient Greek times, it has always been the interest of scholars. However, for a long time, most of the studies focused on"What's the essence of humor,"involving many fields, such as aesthetics, philosophy, anthropology, sociology, etc., with three classical theories of humor developed: incongruity, superiority and relief. However, in recent years, with the emergence, development and prosperity of basic theories of semantics, especially the maturation of pragmatics, we have been endowed with a wider view of vision and new perspectives to study humor. Now, we have begun to explore the forming mechanism of verbal humor.The analysis of language should not be simply limited to the grammatical analysis and the elaboration of words, but a complex cognitive process of psychology. Likely, the realization of verbal humor is also a cognitive process, an ostensive-inferential process, so it is necessary for us to study verbal humor from the cognitive point of view. As an inferential theory of communication, the Relevance Theory which was put forward by Sperber and Wilson in 1986 aims to explain how the audience infers the communicator's intended meaning. And the history of its application has proved it to be a comparatively mature cognitive theory. The Relevance Theory presents two kinds of relevance—maximal relevance and optimal relevance, with the difference between them as an important part of it. Maximal relevance means that the addressee gets the greatest contextual effects for the smallest processing effort, while optimal relevance indicates that the addressee gets enough contextual effects at no gratuitous effort. And the Relevance theory also presents two principles---cognitive principle (i.e., human cognition tends to be geared to the maximization of relevance) and communicative principle (i.e., every act of ostensive communication communicates a presumption of its own optimal relevance). Based on the incongruity characteristic of humor mentioned in the theory of incongruity, the realization of verbal humor is divided into two parts in this paper: the production of incongruity and the understanding of the incongruity, carried out by the humor producer and the humor addressee respectively. Then the fact is analyzed that it is the human's cognitive tendency that the humor producer makes use of to produce the punch line which is incongruous with the addressee's expected maximal...