论文总字数：45142字

摘 要

1. Introduction 1

1.1 Research Background 1

1.2 Needs of the Study 1

1.3 Research Purpose 2

1.4 Structure of paper 3

2. Literature Review 4

2.1 Definition of Verbal Humor 4

2.2 An Overview of Relevance Theory 5

2.2.1 Explicitness and Reasoning 5

2.2.2 Dynamic Cognitive Environment 6

2.2.3 Contextual Effects 6

2.3 Relevance Theory and Humor 7

2.4 Research on Humor from the Perspective of Relevance Theory 9

2.5 Research Gap 10

3. Research Methodology 11

3.1 Research Questions 11

3.2 Corpus for the Study 11

3.3 Research methods 12

4. Results and Discussion 13

4.1 The Production of Verbal Humor 13

4.1.1 The Application of Creative Language 13

4.1.2 Unexpected Dialogue 15

4.1.3 Richness of Dialogue Meaning 16

4.2 The Understanding of Verbal Humor 18

4.2.1 Contrast between Maximum and Best Correlation 18

4.2.2 The Changes in the Cognitive Environment 20

5.Conclusion 22

5.1 Major Findings 22

5.2 Limitations of the Study 23

References 24

Acknowledgments

I really want to thank those who have helped and supported me when I was writing this thesis from my heart.

First, I would love to give my heartfelt gratitude to my supervisor, Prof. Sun Li, who has offered me constant guidance whether from the beginning of the topic selection or in the process of data collection. Her professional knowledge, rigorous academic attitude, excelsior work style, strict self-discipline and easy-going personality charm has far-reaching impact on me. Therefore, Prof. Sun gave me precious instructions in my studies as well as positive influence on my thought and life.

Next, my gratitude should be given to the professors in the School of Foreign Languages and Literature in Nanjing Tech University. They have shared their academic knowledge, broaden horizon and profound thinking with us, which creates a great academic atmosphere for me, so that my paper could be more rigorous.

Then, I feel like giving my appreciation to my friends accompanying me when I was confronted with barriers in both thesis and life. I enjoy communicating with them and without their help, I couldn't successfully solve all kinds of difficulties in life.

Last but not least, I would like to express my profound love to my family, whose unwavering care and strong support in life contributed a lot to the successful completion of the present paper.

Abstract

Humor often appears in people's conversations, and it plays a key role in people’s communication. The generation of humor can create a relaxed and pleasant atmosphere for the dialogue environment and make the communication activities more enjoyable. Since the introduction of relevance theory in China, there have been many articles introducing and commenting. There are also a majority of scholars using relevance theory for discourse analysis, in general, they still focus on the study of foreign language works. Foreign language pragmatic phenomena or translation theory can be analyzed through relevance theory. However, few studies use relevance theory to analyze Chinese works. Relevance theory, as a new theory of cognitive linguistics, can make the study of Chinese communication more substantial and thorough.

Based on the theory of relevance, this article analyzes the dialogues in the TV drama my own swordsman which has become very popular in recent years. Combined with the specific dialogue in the play, the characteristics of humorous language are summarized, and the understanding process and cognitive steps of humorous language are discussed in detail. This article concludes that humor arises because the content it conveys can meet the basic psychological needs of the audience; There are two stages in the process of understanding humorous speech: the difference between the largest and best associations and the expansion of the cognitive environment. Through the study of Chinese humorous speech, it provides a case for the study of Chinese humor under the relevance theory, which is also the ultimate significance of the study.

Keywords: Humor; Dialogue; Relevance theory; My own swordsman

中文摘要

幽默经常会出现在人们的对话当中，它在人们交际时扮演着关键的环节。幽默的产生可以给对话环境创造一种轻松愉悦的氛围，使得交际活动变得更加的愉快。关联理论自引入中国以来，出现了不少介绍和评述的文章，也有越来越多的学者利用关联理论进行话语分析，但是总的来说依然集中在外语作品的研究，使用该理论研究外语语用现象或翻译理论。然而，以该理论来研究汉语作品的很少。而关联理论作为认知语言学的一个理论，从认知和话语理解的角度来加以研究，可以使对汉语交际的研究更加充实、更加透彻。本文以关联理论作为框架分析了电视剧《武林外传》中的对白。结合该剧中的具体对白，总结其幽默语言的特征，并且对幽默语言的理解过程和认知步骤进行了详细的探讨。本文得出的结论为幽默的产生是由于它所传达的内容能够满足观众的基本心理需求；幽默言语的理解过程有二个阶段：即最大关联和最佳关联的差异和认知环境的扩大。通过对汉语幽默言语的研究，为关联理论下的汉语研究提供一个视角，从而进一步拓展该理论的应用范围。

关键词：幽默；对白；关联理论；《武林外传》

Introduction

Research Background

Humor is not only a special communication activity, but also an infectious and charming language art, so it appears frequently in literature, film and television and daily communication (Tu jing, 2007). In the process of speech conversation, the speaker promotes the generation of humor by means of pun, suspense, satire and so on, takes humor to conversation for each other, thus, humor is vital for people to communicate. For a long time, the study of humor has involved many fields such as philosophy, aesthetics, sociology, psychology and so on (Li cheng, 2018). The rapid research on linguistics promote the development of humor. How does humor come about, and how is it understood by the hearer? Throughout previous studies, the analysis of language cannot give a satisfactory answer. We believe that analyzing verbal humor from a pragmatic perspective can better explain the cognitive process of verbal humor.

Therefore, a large number of researchers have expounded the pragmatic reasoning of humor, and the pragmatic analysis of humorous language is mainly summarized as the analysis in context, including indicative language ambiguity, following and violating the principle of cooperation, premise misunderstanding, speech act misunderstanding and discourse lack of relevance.

In view of the complexity and diversity of previous studies, this paper is aimed to study the understanding and production of verbal humor from the perspective of relevance theory in the case study of My Own Swordsman, thus helping us to better understand and appreciate verbal humor.

Needs of the Study

Sitcom is a unique art of language. Firstly, it originated in the United States, after its witty humorous speech and the comic effect, it successfully hit the television screen, and won the public's strong welcome and enthusiastic pursuit. Humor in sitcoms is ignored by researcher in linguistics. As the representative of the new generation sitcom, the speech humor in the play keeps up with the times. Also, the properties of era can be performed by humor, so humor is critical for future growth related to the sitcoms.

Under different reasons for the humorous effect, the listener's understanding of humorous speech experiences similar cognitive tasks. At this point, there is no difference between humorous speech understanding and general speech understanding. The humor language can be interpreted by relevance theory. It is very universal to study humorous speech from this basic process. The purpose of this article is to analyze the cognitive tasks of human speech understanding based on the main points of relevance theory, to study the whole process of humorous pragmatics, from the production of humorous pleasure to the understanding and process of humorous discourse, it is proposed Humor strategy.

1.3 Research Purpose

Humor speech plays an important role in human communication activities, it is easier and smoother for communication by using vivid and interesting humorous language. People like humor, and humorous people can always be accepted by others. Humor is a special form of communication. In a joyous and pleasant communication atmosphere, humorous discourse often reflects the communicative intentions of life and irony, and reflects the speaker's wisdom and life attitude

In my paper, I will take the relevance theory in pragmatic theory as the framework to explore the verbal humor. According to previous studies, I conclude that although relevance theory is not produced for the purpose of analyzing humor, its theoretical hypothesis is reasonably applied to explain verbal humor, so my paper is aimed to explore how verbal humor is realized under the perspective of relevance theory.

1.4 Structure of paper

Chapter one introduces the background and purpose of this topic. Chapter two reviews the literature, including the definition of verbal humor and the relevance theory. The research question and corpus are analyzed in Chapter Three. The production of verbal humor is analyzed in chapter four. Chapter five discuss the production mechanism related to verbal humor and contextual factors influencing the understanding of verbal humor. The major findings and limitation are concluded in last chapter.

Literature Review

Definition of Verbal Humor

Humor is a multi-dimensional, interdisciplinary concept, and its research involves many factors and cover a wide range of fields. “Humor” is considered as a foreign word, and widely used as an aesthetic concept until the end of the 17th century (Liu naishi, 2005). It is mainly used to express the behavior and conversation characteristics that can make people amused and laugh. There are many advantages on the humor. Firstly, humor is an art and indispensable comedy in human life. Moreover, Humor are representatives of talent and force as well as a civilization created by human beings facing a common life dilemma (Wu zulin, 1984). In addition, humor is a bridge that brings people closer to each other and make up for the gap between people. People can mutually communicate the ideas through humor, and further promote emotion. Therefore, the modern humor theory holds that humor can create a sense of friendship and unanimous external aggression among participants. It is a critical role in the social life due to the people who laugh together suggest that they have common interests and hobbies, and further establish a good social relationship with others.

Actually, humor is both subtle and complex. The scholar of Lin yu-tang state that there is no way to talk about humor, it’s better not to say it than to say it vaguely (Yu luanzhen, 2005). It is regarded to be a kind of ridiculous thing, and it is also seen as a technique of language use. As early as in the Plato and Aris eras of ancient Greece, many Western writers, psychologists, and philosophers had in-depth thoughts and research on humor. However, humor is so elusive that many philosophers are confused. Aristotle believes that humor is a ridiculous thing that contains all kinds of flaws or ugliness that do not cause harm and suffering. Freud argue that humor is the way humans vent their suppressed desires. Moreover, the American New Age Encyclopedia hold the opinion that humor expresses the smug attitude of people when they laugh at themselves and the society they create. humor has two meanings in literature and art according to the book of ‘CiHai’. On the one hand, the main aesthetic feature of humor is a simple, playful but profound smile, manifested in the attitude of consciousness to the aesthetic object. On the other hand, humor has the ability to discover the comic factors in life and create dramatic factors in art. It is found that humor attempt to make an appropriate evaluation of life in a fun or meaningful language. It not only reveals the wisdom from absurdity, but also indicates the sublimity from plainness. In addition, the sorrow was also described in the ridiculous language. Furthermore, the essence of life with random descriptions was depicted. In short, wisdom is the foundation of humor, and humor is the embodiment of wisdom.

2.2 An Overview of Relevance Theory

2.2.1 Explicitness and Reasoning

Sperber and Wilson believe that the understanding and communication of human discourse is far more than a non-intelligent, mechanical coding, but an ‘explicit-reasoning’ process. Explicit means an act in which the speaker explicitly presents a diagram to the listener; Reasoning refer to the listener reasons the speaker’s language. From the perspective of the speaker, communication is an explicit process of coding and presenting the intention of information; From the perspective of the listener, communication is the process of decoding the speaker’s behavior, combining contextual assumptions, and trying to find a connection, so as to infer the speaker's implicit communicative intention and obtain the contextual effect. In short, relevance theory views explicitness and reasoning as two indispensable components of human communication.

2.2.2 Dynamic Cognitive Environment

Relevance theory is not the same as traditional pragmatic theories. The context of relevance theory includes not only the linguistic context and non-verbal context in the traditional context, but also the ‘cognitive context’ that explains the hypothesis of communicative intention. It is mainly composed of three kinds of information: lexical information, encyclopedic information about the world, and logical information. Different people have different cognitive contexts, and both parties in the communication can make common cognition and inference to the facts or hypotheses in the cognitive context to achieve the purpose of understanding. Relevance theory believes that the cognitive context is a dynamic context. In language communication, Relevance can be regarded as a constant term, and context is a variable term. Communication always chooses the hypothesis of the best correlation from the cognitive context, and uses the minimum effort to obtain the maximum context effect, thereby establishing the best correlation.

2.2.3 Contextual Effects

Context in language is continually changing as for relevance theory. When new information meets existing contextual assumptions, there are generally three changes: (1) New information strengthens existing contextual assumptions; (2) existed contextual assumptions can be broken by the new context; (3) New language can be obtained by the changing of the existed context (Fu Lan, 2012). The degree of contextual effect depends on relevance. Sperber and Wilson (2013) point out that under the same conditions, contextual effects increase with increasing relevance.

Relevance Theory and Humor

The originator of humor often first gives a proposition in the background introduction, inducing the listener or reader to choose the most relevant explanation according to the context and background knowledge. Then we come up with a proposition that is the opposite or ‘unexpected’ of the previous proposition, interrupting the reasoning of the listener or reader, so that it has to re-understand the meaning of the entire discourse in order to get the best correlation. When understanding humor, it often seems that some discourses are not very relevant. Humor recipients often have to work harder to get contextual effects, and the reward is the joy and laughter they get from humor. Wilson believes that additional effort means additional effects. The following analyzes the appreciation process of discourse humor from three aspects: communicative intention, contextual effect, and relevance principle.

Firstly, Sperber and Wilson believe that explicit and inferential communication involves informational and communicative intention. The information intention is the literal or natural meaning of the discourse, that is, the meaning that the speaker expresses to the listener, and provides a basis for the listener to reason; Communicative intention is another level of meaning in discourse. It is related to the reasoning process when the listener understands information intention. Once the listener understands the communicative intentions of the speaker, the discourse achieves the best relevance. The listener’s effort is optimally balanced with the cognitive effect.

Secondly, the context view of relevance theory is different from the traditional context view. The context in relevance theory is called ‘cognitive context’. Humor arises from the assumption that new information revises or overturns the original context. If the new information merely reinforces the old information in the cognitive context, it can only continue the original hypothesis. The humorous receiver only needs to make a small effort to verify his expectations. When the new information conflicts with the newly established context assumptions and overturns the expected results, extra cognitive efforts are required to find the correlation, and the reward is the humorous context.

The process of humorous discourse can be divided into two stages. The first stage is the stage of starting the context of maximum relevance, which is an inevitable manifestation of human cognitive instinct. The most relevant context is a series of habitual assumptions. The second stage is the stage of finding the best relevant context.

The maximum relevant contextual hypothesis initiated by the listener in the first stage will be overturned by the speaker’s new information, hypothesis or communicative intention, reaching a climax of the contextual hypothesis of humorous discourse.

This article believes that compared with previous humor studies, there are three main advantages of studying humorous speech from the perspective of relevance theory: First, relevance theory itself integrates cognitive linguistics, pragmatics, psychology, philosophy, etc. Disciplinary point of view is an interdisciplinary theory. Its main point of view is relatively persuasive and can be supported by the research results of various disciplines. Second, relevance theory studies the entire process of human communication and speech understanding from a cognitive perspective. The theory itself is relatively complete. Thirdly, this article believes that humorous speech is special, but in essence, it is still part of human communication, and its understanding process should be similar to general speech. The study of humorous speech from the perspective of relevance theory can prove its universality on the one hand, and at the same time it can discover its particularity. The dialectical unified research conclusions of universality and particularity are more powerful and perfect.

Research on Humor from the Perspective of Relevance Theory

Relevance theory believes that human cognition has a general goal, that is, in the cognitive process, it strives to obtain the maximum effect with minimal effort. Therefore, people always focus on the most relevant information, and they always establish the hypothesis based on the principle of optimal association in the process of processing information. In 1995, Sperber and Wilson published the second edition of the book, revising some of the content of the first edition to better improve the relevance theory. The book is divided into four chapters in the same way, which clearly puts forward the communicative view, reasoning, relevance of the relevance theory and the interpretation of language communication under the relevance theory.

“Relevance Theory and Translation Studies” of Wang Jianguo published in 2009 is to use relevance theory to provide new insights into translation. According to the content of relevance theory, he made guiding suggestions on translation issues such as English-Chinese translation and interpretation. Yu Nasha (2014) discussed in detail the humorous speech translation in the sitcom “Big Bang” from the perspective of relevance theory. This article first discusses the production mechanism of humorous speech from the perspective of relevance theory; secondly, this article explores the applicability of relevance theory to humorous speech translation; Finally, the feasible translation strategies for film and television humorous speech from the perspective of relevance theory are proposed, including direct translation strategy and indirect translation strategy, and detailed examples of direct translation of direct translation, annotation method and supplementary method of indirect translation.

2.5 Research Gap

Theoretically, the study of humorous behavior is a special application of relevance theory and a summary of human communication and speech interpretation (Sperper, 2013). It was earlier in the West to discuss relevance theory and humor. Pocheptsov G.’s “Language and Humor” in 1981 is an early article that explored the combination of humor and relevance theory. In the article, the author divides humor into situation and verbal humor, focusing on verbal humor. In 2003, Francisco proposed the broad development space of relevance theory in humor translation. in his “humor and the search”. So, the research on humor and relevance theory is relatively mature in abroad.

In China, there are also many research results of relevance theory from the perspective of concrete examples, theoretical basic content and translation. there are also many achievements in combining relevance theory and humor research. However, the results of special discussions in Chinese are few. Zhao Hong published a case study of verbal irony in the book “Pride and Prejudice” to study prejudiced verbal irony under the framework of relevance theory in 2008; Qu Pei (2018) uses relevance theory to analyze and discuss the discourse conversion of humorous discourse in the translation of “Alice in Wonderland”.

In summary, relevance theory, as an important branch of pragmatics research, is an indispensable part of pragmatics. Domestic research results tend to study the comparison of relevance theories in Chinese and English language texts, and there are few works that study relevance theory in Chinese texts. New ideas and new perspectives for pragmatic studies can be provided by studying the verbal humor of My own swordsman from the perspective of relevance theory. Secondly, the research of this subject has guiding significance. Relevance theory can be applied to people's daily speech communication. People can properly apply them to verbal conversations in daily life by grasping language features more accurately.

Research Methodology

Research Questions

Relevance theory systematically describes the whole process of human speech understanding. It is very universal starting from this basic process to study humorous speech. The purpose of this article is to analyze the cognitive tasks of human speech understanding based on relevance theory, and to study the whole process of humorous pragmatics from the production of humorous pleasure to the understanding and process of humorous speech. This article attempts to answer two questions through research:

(1) According to relevance theory, what is the mechanism of verbal humor’s production?

(2) What contextual factors influence the understanding of verbal humor?

Corpus for the Study

People generally believe that the relevance theory can explain the verbal humor, therefore, this paper will use some of the corpus of My Own Swordsman to prove this view. On the basis of this framework, relevant representative corpus fragments will be collected to analyze the verbal humor from the perspective of relevance.

The research corpus of this article is the lines of the sitcom My Own Swordsman, which attracted wide attention in 2006. This TV series has a total of 80 episodes. The background is the Ming Dynasty. A yellow-haired girl named Guo Furong first entered the rivers and lakes and was trapped in the inn because of the money. The story begins from this, and in turn leads to Tong Xiangyu, Bai Zhantang, Lü Xiucai, Li Dazui, Mo Xiaobei, Xing Shoutou, Yan Xiaoliu, Qian Zhang, and other young heroes with different personalities.

The ratings and word-of-mouth of My Own Swordsman show that most people affirm their humor; on the other hand, as TV station words, the character dialogue is closer to natural language, which ensures the credibility of the research. The lines of My Own Swordsman serve as the source of corpus for the study.

3.3 Research methods

The current research on humor is mainly theoretical guessing, and qualitative research is done on the basis of analyzing corpus. This article is also based on the analysis of the lines of the corpus My Own Swordsman. Under the main point of relevance theory, it summarizes the main principles of humor and integrates the cognitive process of humorous verbal understanding. Therefore, the research method in this paper is qualitative research oriented on corpus.

The process of understanding and analysis of humorous speech is divided into three stages: the gap between the largest and the best relevance theory; the change of the cognitive environment and the reveal of the implicit intention. The specific examples can be seen in section 4.2.

Results and Discussion

The understanding of humorous speech and the production of humorous effects depend on the cognitive process of the listener. The listener not only needs to understand the information intent of the speaker's speech, but also needs to reason with the context to derive the communicative intention of the speaker, and this intent can meet the psychological needs of the listener. Only with the participation and support of the listener can the humorous effect be produced. Therefore, this article believes that the humorous effect of lines in My own swordsman is that its language style and characteristics can meet the psychological needs of listeners.

4.1 The Production of Verbal Humor

My own swordsman has a variety of language styles. It uses a variety of linguistic materials and seems a bit scattered, but its main spirit is very unified. We can find its humor mainly comes from three aspects: First, the creative use of language brings new and funny feelings; Secondly, the dialogue develops unexpectedly and gives an unpredictable feeling; Third, simple lines convey some profound meanings while expressing humor. It is these achievements that make true humor.

4.1.1 The Application of Creative Language

The various language styles in My own swordsman highlights the novel intention. Non-contextual lexical sentences, creating new words, misinterpreting the meaning of idioms, and the mixed use of dialects, poetry, lyrics, foreign languages and other language materials, give the audience a fresh look. The main manifestation in language is a mixture of various language materials. The creative use of language forms can bring people novelty and joyful feelings, which meets the psychological needs of human beings to break through tradition and pursue new things. In My own swordsman, there are often discourses that are inconsistent with the background of the times, the identity of the characters, and the current plot. This discourse will give the audience a wrong feeling, because it is inconsistent with the basic assumptions in the audience's existing cognition conflict. Such as:

(1) Xiao Guo: First of all, your store is too small.

Lao Bai: This is already the biggest inn in the nearby fifty miles!

Xiao Guo: Because the scale is too small, the company lacks competitiveness and cohesion, and cannot form a brand effect.

Potential customers are lost.

Dispensers: Oops, girl Guo is so bright.

The words used in my own swordsman are totally inconsistent with the era of the TV series, and it is more like a case study of business administration. This conversation may be fully understood by professionals, and it may be difficult for the general audience to understand. However, viewers can get a sense of absurdity from this language form by using speech that is completely out of context, and then get implicit meaning from the subsequent plot: the words are very good, and there are a lot of truths. In fact, nothing can be done when doing things. The sense of humor here does not come from the exact meaning of language, but from the novelty of form. Such examples can often be found in My own swordsman: "Low profile", "biceps", "professional ethics", "donkey"，“gold medal”、“To do or not to do”。

(2) Lao Xing: Guo Juxia! Guo Juxia!

Primary Six: Why is this name so strange, Master?

Lao Xing: (gasping) This is not a name, this is a salutation. Most people are called heroes, but her father is a hero, so it is called a hero！

“巨侠” is a new term coined directly by screenwriters. Because “巨”is higher than “大”. Therefore, it is used to indicate that Guo Furong’s father is “hero”. This innovative approach brings a sense of humor to the audience. Many classic words in My own swordsman are widely circulated and welcomed by young people. These people have high cultural literacy, pursue personality and fashion, have a desire for innovation, and they also have the ability to accept new things.

4.1.2 Unexpected Dialogue

In My own swordsman, the language is full of novelty, and the logic of character dialogue is often unexpected. The unexpected explanation is another major feature of this TV series. Human beings have perceptual nature as for psychoanalysis. However, the dialogue in My own swordsman always makes people unable to grasp the plot development, and cannot predict the true nature of the story, and this unexpected plot has brought great joy to the audience.

(3) Rose: My sister always tells you at home that you are like a flower.

Tong shopkeeper: (Le) also praised me, which is really strange. Xiao Guo, your skin is also good recently.

Guo Furong: (Le) Yeah yeah.

Rose: Tong shopkeeper, I really admire you. Look at you as a widow. You have eaten so much and suffered so much, (Xiao Guo and the shopkeeper ’s faces are slowly sinking) But you still ca n’t forget it. Looking for the second spring.

The audience speculated that what Rose said later should be how Xiao Guo praised the shopkeeper, which was consistent with the first sentence that Rose said. But unexpectedly, Qiangwei satirized that the shopkeeper was a widow, and she wanted to marry again. This logical conflict is very strong, the seemingly praised dialogue is actually demeaning, which makes the audience feel funny.

(4) Dispensers: Don't come over, the bitter sea is boundlessly turned back to shore, shore.

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