“關(guān)聯(lián)理論”視角下言語幽默中的歧義

1、重慶大學(xué)碩士學(xué)位論文“關(guān)聯(lián)理論“視角下言語幽默中的歧義姓名：張?zhí)m申請學(xué)位級別：碩士專業(yè)：外國語言學(xué)及應(yīng)用語言學(xué)指導(dǎo)教師：余渭深2010-05M.A. Thesis of Chongqing University ABSTRACT IIABSTRACT Sperber and Wilson's Relevance Theory is used as the

2、theoretical framework of this thesis in order to explore the process of the generation and cognitive understanding of verbal humors. Relevance Theory is based on the definition of relevance and two principles. These two

3、principles are the cognitive principle and the communicative principle. Sperber and Wilson think that people's verbal communication is the process of seeking for relevance. But the problem is how as a recipient, the

4、listener or reader of the humors finds the relevance, and thus feels the humorous effects. That is just the focus of the paper. From the perspective of Relevance Theory, the comprehension of humors is a cognitive process

5、 of seeking for relevance for the listener. In this process, the principle of relevance plays a guiding role. The maximal relevance and the optimal relevance are two important concepts in the Relevance Theory, and the ga

6、p between the maximal relevance and the optimal relevance acts as the trigger of the humorous effects.. By analyzing humors in “Readers“, we believe that the understanding process of humor is as follows: the listener, ac

7、cording to the initial context of the discourse, first makes the maximal relevance expectation with least effort. However, with the progress of the discourse, the listener may feel the maximal relevance expectation seems

8、 to be irrelevant to the new information. Driven by seeking for the relevance, the listener thinks this irrelevance is apparent and expands the context to further infer the attitude and the meaning that the speaker inten

9、ds to convey. Extra effort can bring about additional contextual effects. The listener discovers the optimal relevance of the new information and gets humorous effects. Therefore, the understanding of humor can be said t

10、o be the process, during which the listener finds relevance from the utterance that originally seems to be irrelevant. However, it is just the gap between the maximal relevance and the optimal relevance that results in t

11、he humorous effects. And this gap can be influenced by many factors. Ambiguity is one of the main factors. This thesis aims to analyze the gap from phonological ambiguity, lexical ambiguity, cultural ambiguity, syntactic

12、 ambiguity and the omission of information, and tries to find out human cognitive understanding mechanism, in order to make readers better understand verbal humors. The innovation of this thesis is to study verbal humor