Abstract:Humor，as a most complex and ubiquitous ways of human communication, has long received attention from a variety of disciplines, such as philosophy, aesthetics, anthropology, sociology, psychology, etc. There are a great many important findings in their own fields. However, among them, few studies are based on the theory of cognitive pragmatics.

As a general theory for human cognition and communication, Sperber & Wilson’s relevance theory provides a new perspective on utterance understanding. Taking verbal humor in the famous American sitcom Friends as data and relevance theory as approach, the author has made a tentative exploration for the underlying mechanism that determines how verbal humor is expressed and produced and has wondered if relevance theory can explain all the humor utterance in Friends. 

Through data analysis by employing relevance theory, the author make a conclusion: first, the ostensive-inferential process and the conflict between maximal and optimal relevance is where humor comes out; second, relevance theory can explain most of the humor utterance in Friends, and only few of it cannot explain by relevance theory.

Key words： relevance theory; humor utterance; situation sitcom; Friends

Table of Contents

Abstract

摘要

1. Introduction-1

1.1 Background of the study-1

1.2 Data source-1

1.3 Structure of the paper-2

2. Literature Review-3

2.1 Researches on humor abroad-3

2.2 Researches on humor in China-4

2.3 Researches on relevance theory-4

2.3.1 Relevance theory: a brief introduction-4

2.3.2 Review of the previous researches on relevance theory-5

3. Theoretical Framework of Relevance Theory-6

3.1 Ostensive & inference-6

3.2 Maximal relevance & optimal relevance-7

4. Analysis on Verbal Humor in Friends based on Relevance-Theory-8

4.1 Basic strategies of verbal humor production-8

4.1.1 The combination of ostensive and inference-8

4.1.2 The gap between maximal relevance and optimal relevance-10

4.2 Relevance theory can not explain-12

5. Conclusion-14

References-15

Acknowledgements-17