The Interpretation Of Verbal Humor In Oscar Wilde’s Comedy From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

Verbal humor, the inclination of particular cognitive experience of human, can either highlight one’s personalities and temperament or improve the interpersonal relationships. Therefore, verbal humor plays an irreplaceable role in human communication. Since ancient times, humans have conducted inexhaustible explorations into verbal humor and great achievements have been made in the field of philosophy, psychology, cognitive science, etc. In history, both foreign and domestic scholars have contributed a lot to the studies on humor. In the West, there are three conventional theories of humor, namely, incongruity theory, relief theory and superiority theory. In China, the rhetorical researches on verbal humor is extremely remarkable and the the studies on humor are developing rapidly in the pragmatic and cognitive domain. However, the pragmatic analysis on verbal humor has been still quite limited so far, among which most have focused on cooperative principle and politeness principle without taking into account the whole process and mechanism of the generation and interpretation of verbal humor.Therefore, based on the previous studies, the present thesis makes a relatively comprehensive probe into verbal humor in the outstanding dramatic work An Ideal Husband from the excellent British playwright Oscar Wilde in the nineteenth century, in which the humorous discourse that highlights the female thoughts is selected as the cases. On the one hand, the qualitative analysis of verbal humor is adopted in this paper to interpret the humorous utterance in the classic play from the angle of both the communicator and the audience.and to gradually sum up the understanding process and the cognitive procedures of verbal humor. On the other hand, with the new concept of the female in Wilde’s ideas as the breakthrough point, the article has analyzed various female images and characteristics which are implied in the verbal humor. In this case, the thesis has systematically and comprehensively displayed both the function and mechanism of verbal humor as well as the playwright’s intent demonstrated in the humorous communication.In the first chapter of this paper, an overview of the definition and classification of humor, the definition and mechanism of verbal humor as well as the research purpose, significance and structure is provided. Then the review of the theories and studies of humor.both at home and abroad is introduced in the second chapter. The third chapter is a description of the content and opinions of the theoretical basis of this paper, that is, relevance theory. The fourth chapter is regarded as the main part, which has discussed the interpretation of humorous speeches from the mutual manifestness of cognitive environments, the humorous effects achieved from the ostensive inferential model, the significance of contextual effects, the explanatory power of maximal relevance and optimal relevance in comprehending the humorous discourse, the great application of the principle of relevance to the indirect humorous sentences with metaphorical or ironical meaning, semantic ambiguity and incomplete propositional form. The fifth chapter is the concluding part of this article, in which the author summarizes major findings on the explanatory power of relevance theory for the interpretation of verbal humor, and points out the deficiencies in this study as well.