基于关联理论的言语幽默效果研究外国语言学与应用语言学专业论文.docxVIP

II II Abstract Humor is the essence of human culture and life. It not only brings people pleasure and regulates the communication atmosphere, but also relieves pressure and helps people avoid embarrassment. And at the same time the information and the communicative intension are also transmitted. Therefore, humor is extensively studied in humanities, such as philosophy, aesthetics, anthropology, sociology, psychology and so on. In the linguistic field different scholars study humor from distinctive aspects. Sperber Wilson’s Relevance Theory brings us a new cognitive pragmatic angle to interpret humor. According to Sperber and Wilson, human communication is an ostensive- inferential communication and in this process people try to seek relevance. Relevance Theory is based on the definition of relevance and two general principles. Relevance is defined in terms of cognitive effects and processing effort: (a) The greater the cognitive effects, the greater the relevance; (b) The smaller the processing effort, the greater the relevance. Cognitive Principle and Communicative Principle are the two general principles. The Cognitive Principle means that human cognition tends to be geared to the maximization of relevance while the Communicative Principle indicates that utterances create presumptions of optimal relevance. This thesis mainly goes to analyze and study systematically the cognitive mechanism of the production and comprehension of humor from the perspective of Relevance Theory. The first problem to study in this thesis is the cognitive mechanism of the production of the humor and the process of the humor comprehension; the second is the cognitive barriers influencing the humor comprehension. As for the first problem, by adopting qualitative methodology and carrying out a lot of data analyses, it is discovered that the Relevance Principle plays a very critical role in the process of humor comprehension. Whether the humor succeeds or not depends on the hearer’s correct