A Study Of American Humor In Verbal Communication From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

People cannot live without communication, and verbal communication, as oneaspect of communication, plays a significant role in human beings’ life. In our dailycommunication, sometimes, with the purpose to achieve a better communication effect,people tend to use some humorous elements. The researches of humor are involved in avariety of academic fields, such as Anthropology, Linguistics, Literature, Sociology,Pedagogy, Psychology, and so on. Among the academic fields listed above, studies ofhumor from the perspective of linguistics have reached remarkable achievements.Linguistic studies of humor focus on the aspects of pragmatics, rhetoric, cognitivelinguistics, systemic functional linguistics and so on. This study takes one of the populartheories in the field of Pragmatics---Relevance theory as the theoretical basis of theresearch.The relevance theory, the theoretical basis of cognitive pragmatics, is for the firsttime introduced by Sperber and Wilson (1986) in Relevance: communication andcognition on the basis of Grice’s Principle of Relevance. Relevance theory has beenapplied into various fields of linguistics ever since1980s, and has achieved fruitfulresults. This theory from the perspective of human being’s cognition, combinecommunication and cognition and has elaborated the principle of relevance in details,pointing out that language communication is a process of cognitive inference.Relevance theory elaborates that the ostensive process and the inferential process are thetwo aspects of communication. On the one hand, from the perspective of the speaker,communication is a process of message sending, that is, the speaker in thecommunication clearly expresses his or her intention. On the other hand, from theperspective of the listener, communication is an inferential process, in which the listenertries to infer the speaker’s communicational intention on the basis of the informationthat the speaker expresses. Both parties involved in the communication can understandeach other’s implied meaning, mainly because that there is a best mode of cognition,that is relevance.Relevance theory has witnessed great improvement, and at the same time, thelinguistic academic circle has a growing interest in humor. More and more scholarsbegan to pay attention to verbal humor and probe into the process of the creation of humor effect. In this study, the research objective is the verbal humor appears in TheBig Bang Theory. Released in the year2007, the show is a highly welcomed Americansitcom both at home and abroad.Based on relevance theory, this paper analyzes the verbal humor in The Big BangTheory. By analyzing the verbal humor in The Big Bang Theory from the perspective ofrelevance theory, this research takes the main issues of Relevance theory, namely theostensive-inferential process, maximal and optimal relevance, cognitive competence asthe points for penetration, and discusses the content and context of the humorousutterance in the cases, the causes of the humor effect, as well as the communicativeintention of both parties in the humor discourse, so as to provide with the readers a moreprofound understanding of the verbal humor in this sitcom. With a combination oftheory and real cases, this study is rendered to enhance the understanding of relevancetheory and meanwhile have a broad understanding of American verbal humor andculture. The findings are as follows:1. In the ostensive-inferential process, the main character’s cognition of The BigBang Theory is always relevance-oriented. The effect of humor is often produced in thedifferences between people’s cognitive competence; the understanding deviation of bothparties on each other’s cognitive environment and the contrast between the maximalrelevance and optimal relevance.2. Humor is associated with culture, and as a part of culture, it highly condensesthe essence of culture. The verbal humor in The Big Bang Theory reflects the socialvalue, appreciation style of the beauty, ideology and other aspects of the United States.Understanding the cultural difference between China and the United States can helpachieve better communicative effect in the cross-cultural communication.