Relevance-Salience Model Of Verbal Humor In Talk Show

As a ubiquitous phenomenon, humor has been arousing numerous attentions from academic fields. Many studies have been carried out on verbal humor from the perspective of psychology, sociology, philosophy. It was not until1970s that humor studies began to capture an important position in the linguistics. Influenced by the classical incongruity theory, many theories are put forward and notions such as script, frame, etc., are all trying to explain humor from their own angle. However, they all fail to explain effectively why one meaning is activated instead of another, which is a core issue before we moved on to the concept of incongruity. Relevance theory then appeared in pragmatics as an ambitious attempt aiming at a thorough explanation of how hearers choose one single interpretation which is consistent with the speaker’s intention and the relevance-based humor studies are inspiring. However, the relevance theory is too idealistic and the principle of relevance can only be used as a restrictive condition rather than a general principle. The appearance of the graded salience-based optimal innovation hypothesis and marked informativeness requirement proposed by the Israel linguist Rachel Giora offers us a brand new vision to reexamine the generative mechanism of humor.The graded salience hypothesis describes a new language comprehension model as it holds that the salient meanings enjoy priority over the less salient in the process of language comprehension. The salience is not permanent. Instead, it is determined by four factors, namely, conventionality, frequency, familiarity and prototypicality. The contextual information plays a limited role in the activation of the salient meanings as there are two operating mechanisms involved in the activation process of lexical meanings, bottom-up activation processes, sensitive only to linguistic information, and top-down processes, sensitive to contextual information. The optimal innovation, to some degree, refers to the other side of salience-novelty and creativity of word meanings that can bring people pleasure, humor in a broad sense and the marked informativeness requirement targeted at jokes is a possible means to realize optimal innovation.Together with the reflection on relevance theory put forward by Sperber and Wilson, the author builds a tentative relevance-salience model with the hope of a better comprehension of the generative mechanism of verbal humor. The hearer copes with verbal communication based on principle of relevance and salience while the speaker or humor producer starts a "revolt" by following the principle of optimal innovation and marked informativeness and therefore achieves humorous effects.To test the feasibility of the model, the author applies it to the analysis of the selected examples from the popular talk show Tonight80’s in Shanghai Oriental TV and explores how relevance-salience based hypotheses function to achieve humorous effects in dynamic contexts.