A Relevance-theoretic Analysis Of English Verbal Humor Interpretation

Ever since the appearance of Relevance Theory (RT, Sperber & Wilson, 1986/1995), it has been assumed to be a powerful tool for explaining the interpretation of all kinds of verbal communication, verbal humor included (Yus, 2003: 1330). One of the three classical humor theories? the incongruity theory is commonly considered to study humor from cognitive perspective (Attardo, 1990), so it's always combined with RT to analyze the cognitive interpretation of verbal humor which is generalized as such a process: seeking maximal relevance, finding irrelevance or incongruous phenomena and finally deriving optimal relevance(Zhang Xin, 2005:33). Studies in this way hold that humorous effect is produced by the gap between maximal relevance and optimal relevance. This gave the author implications on seeking more concrete cognitive interpretative procedures of verbal humor. However, both RT and the incongruity theory of humor both illustrate the interpretative processes among the members using the same languages in the same cultural community. Few of the previous studies have touched on how the members of one country understand the humor full of the other country's linguistic and cultural information. That's the reason why the author studied English verbal humor interpretative process from the angle of Chinese English learners and then further detected the obstacle in English verbal appreciation in light with the former study results.The author still applied RT and the complement theory of the incongruity theory of humor-the Incongruity-Resolution Theory of humor (IR theory, Suls, 1972; Shultz, 1978; Ritchie, 2004), to explore the whole interpretative process of English verbal humor and the obstacles which cause the failure of verbal humor comprehension by analyzing sample jokes.The author firstly skimmed four humor websites and decided to choose samples from http://www.ywhc.net/article/class_l.asp as the research materials of the thesis because the jokes on it can reflect the wide-ranging contents of westerners and their popularity among English learners. What's more, most of the langue of these jokes is at moderate complexity levels for English learners (about this point the website janitors have collected the votes from web skimmers and ranged every humor's complexity degrees ranging from lto 5 degrees). Finally, the author chose 20 jokes according to the following standards: each of them has fewer than 200 words for the convenience of study and each of them doesn't have "violent", "vulgar" and "carnal" contents. By analyzing the 20 humorous jokes, the author put forwards her own opinions on interpretative procedures of verbal humor and then proved the reality of each step within RT and IR. Finally, the author detected the obstacles in English verbal humor interpretation. By the study, the author proposed that in an ideal condition, to interpret verbal humor, the procedures of English humor interpretation perhaps consist of five steps: forming a presupposed ending about the punch line when interpreting the set-up part of the joke, coming across an unexpected reply when reading the punch line part, realizing being misled by the speaker and felling more curious about the intentional meaning of the speaker, reinterpreting the joke to derive the implication of the speaker and inferring the attitudes of the speaker. The reader doesn't necessarily process every inferential process according to his cognitive abilities and the complexity degrees of one humor. However, the interpretation process would not be smooth if some relevant information is inaccessible. The difficulty of understanding humor, especially foreign humor, does commonly exist. By exploring the major factors affecting humor misunderstanding, the present study not only enables us to bear in mind that some humorous utterances are indeed beyond comprehension for language learners, but also highlights the reasons why this problem does exist.The thesis is divided into six parts: Chapter 1 is the introduction part about the selection, purpose and significance of the thesis. Chapter 2 gives us a literature review about the definition, three classical humor theories, and related humor studies at home and abroad. Chapter 3 builds the theoretical framework for the further study that includes RT, IR theory. Chapter 4 is about the methodology used in the thesis and Chapter 5 is the main body of the thesis which consists of the explanation of the put forward interpretative procedures and sample analysis of each step involved in verbal humor interpretation. Finally the main obstacles in English humor interpretations were also explained. Chapter 6 is the conclusion part of the thesis, which shows the major findings, implications, limitations, and suggestions of the thesis.