A Study Of The Comprehension Procedure Of Humor In Mark Twain's Works From The Perspective Of The Relevance Theory

Mark Twain is a great humorist in American literature history, and his novels have received world-wide comments and criticisms. His language is said to be unique, vernacular and full of humor. However, the reason why his novels are perceived to be humorous is seldom observed. Therefore, the current thesis attempts to explore the humor understanding mechanisms in Mark Twain's short novels from a new perspective—relevance theory. The emphasis here is laid on the humor interpretation process based on the theory.Chapter One is an introduction to the whole thesis, which introduces the purpose of this research, its significance, research questions and methods used in analysis. Chapter Two is literature review, including an introduction to Mark Twain, three general humor theories and relevance theory. It also reviews some former researches on general humor understanding process based on relevance theory.Chapter Three and Chapter Four are the main body of this thesis, focusing on the application of relevance theory to the analysis of Twain's humor. In Chapter Three, the relationship between relevance theory and incongruity theory is firstly discussed. The"incongruity"in incongruity theory is actually the incongruity of Maximal and Optimal Relevance. Thus, the notion"incongruity"can be integrated into relevance theory. Therefore, searching for humor becomes a process of searching for incongruity between Maximal and Optimal Relevance. Secondly, the relevance-theoretic comprehension of humor is derived from two aspects: context and cognitive environment. Thus a humor-interpreting procedure is summed up, and hence the formula of humor understanding is derived from the analysis. This formula will be used and also examined in analyzing the humorous examples in Chapter Four.In Chapter Four, the data sources chosen from Twain's short novels are classified into two large categories: humor created by rhetorical devices and humor created by relevant contexts. There are seven sub-categories in the first category, namely, metaphor, irony, personification, hyperbole, understatement, parallelism, and metonymy. Within the second category, two sub-classes are mentioned: contextual assumptions and cognitive environment. The formula generated in Chapter Three is proved workable in all these categories. It comes to the conclusion that the searching and solving of the incongruity between Maximal and Optimal Relevance is the key factor in understanding Mark Twain's humor.Chapter Five is the conclusion which puts forward the main contributions of this thesis and also some limitations and suggestions for further study.