A Pragmatic Study On Puns Within The Framework Of Adaptation-Relevance Model

As a special rhetorical device, pun has been widely used in every aspect of linguistic communication. Pun carries a perfect explanation and application of linguistic diversity. Archibald states that pun is a rhetorical figure that produces double contexts in utterance through a linguistic phenomenon of exploiting a word with different meanings or two words with the same or similar pronunciation. For the reason of containing double contexts, people can express their real meaning in an indirect way by using a humor effect. Besides, hearers can take a progress of analyzing and adapting to the contextual correlates, and finally interpret the real intention of using puns and reflect its glamour. This paper will attempt to study pun from two aspects of its production and interpretation by applying Adaptation-Relevance Model. It will illustrate that the linguistic choice and inference results can be seen as a dynamic process of adaptation-relevance.First of all, this thesis introduces the definition, classifications and three characteristics of puns briefly. And then the author makes a literature review of research on pun both in domestic and abroad, mainly including three aspects:the study of rhetorical function of pun, the analysis of pun production mechanism with pragmatic theory, and understanding of puns from a cognitive approach. Secondly, the author introduces the foundation and development of the new Adaptation-Relevance Model. Chinese linguist Ran Yongping proposes a new theory model by combining Sperber and Wilson’s relevance theory with Verschuere’s adaptation theory. This new model is unified by the explanatory power of relevance theory on interpretation and sufficient description of adaptation theory on production. According to this model, it states that the process of pun production and interpretation need the efforts of both speaker and hearer. Both of them need to make relevance presumption with the context. On the one hand, speaker’s choice of utterance should be relevant enough, and it is worth managing and analyzing by hearer. Speaker should think about hearer’s cognitive ability and preference and make a strategy-choosing based on the optimal relevance. On the other hand, hearer has to make efforts for the judgment on the dynamic change of context and the mental, social and physical elements given by speaker. Hearer chooses the inference results in terms of the optimal relevance with contextual assumption, and then realizes the speaker’s communicative intention.The author collects and analyzes some typical examples in advertisement slogan, literature, jokes, press conference and daily communication in TV series. This paper attempts to make an explanation and induction and illuminates the analysis of context adapting is important for pun production. Speaker chooses strategies in the process of adaptation through deducing the contextual correlates and linguistic structure and uses pun to achieve communicative effects including humor and euphemism etc. Speaker uses puns on different linguistic levels, such as phonology, morphology, syntax and discourse, and hearer makes an inference and he/she can fully interpret communicative effects of puns employed by speaker.In conclusion, this thesis makes an integrated study of pun production and interpretation through Adaptation-Relevance Model, and tries to avoid some misunderstanding and ambiguities of using pun through analyzing, and hopes it can help communicators make a reasonable choice of strategies on puns, and accomplish the communicative objective.