Pragmatic Enrichment In The Understanding Of Metarepresentational Verbal Humor

Humor is an indispensable part of human language and plays an important role in social communication.Verbal humor is a special form of verbal communication,which conveys incongruous and funny information to render laughter among the audience.In recent decades,scholars at home and abroad have done a lot of researches on verbal humor,focusing on pragmatics,systematic-functional linguistics,cognitive linguistics and other disciplines.In light of the Relevance Theory,the generation of verbal humor is closely related to context and the understanding of verbal humor needs to be dealt with pragmatically in relation to context consequently.Pragmatic enrichment is exactly such a pragmatic process of seeking relevance information in a specific context so as to determine the discourse meaning in the context.Pragmatic broadening and pragmatic narrowing are two pragmatic processing means adopted by communicators to seek for discourse relevance when they understand discourse.In the context of communication,metarepresentation is not only the reproduction of a certain form or content,but also implies the speaker's pragmatic motivation.Therefore,this paper attempts to analyze the metarepresentational verbal humor in the American sitcom Young Sheldon from the perspective of pragmatic enrichment,and probe into the generation mechanism of metarepresentational verbal humor and the implied pragmatic motivation of the speaker in the context of communication.Based on the theories of metarepresentational verbal humor and pragmatic enrichment,this paper first analyzes the metarepresentational verbal humor in four levels(phonology,morphology,focus and register),followed by its pragmatic functions in the play;then it explains the process of pragmatic enrichment in the interpretation of metarepresentational verbal humor by virtue of context of situation,context of culture and cognitive environment.Having adopted the principle of optimal relevance as the cognitive basis,it discusses the pragmatic cognitive process in light of pragmatic broadening and pragmatic narrowing in that the hearer utilizes the context to enrich the literal meaning of the utterance into the truth value conditional proposition that the speaker wants to express.The major findings of this study are as follows:(1)Pragmatic broadening and pragmatic narrowing are two pragmatic processing methods used by communicators to understand the metarepresentational verbal humor,the improper use of which by both the speaker and the hearer or either side will produce the best relevance option inconsistent with the context;(2)Communicators choose the simplest cognitive processing path to understand discourse,of which pragmatic enrichment of discourse is to meet the relevance expectations of both communicators.If there is a strong contrast or incongruity between the maximum contextual relevance after pragmatic enrichment and the best relevance expectation in communication with the failure of communicator's expectation of relevance in the discourse understanding,humorous effects will be generated;(3)The pragmatic enrichment and cognitive reduction mechanism in the content and form of the interpretation of metarepresentational verbal humor have the pragmatic functions of shaping the character images,promoting the theme development and embodying the artistic techniques in the sitcom Young Sheldon.