Abstract

This thesis, based on the relevance theory proposed by Sperber and Wilson, attempting to investigate the production of English verbal humor and the ways to comprehending English verbal humor, is composed of four major parts. The first part is an introduction, including motivation of the study, purpose and significance of this thesis and besides, a brief introduction to humor from its definition and classification. The second part is a brief survey of relevance theory which provides the key theory for the latter analysis. The third part is devoted to relevance theory and English verbal humor: first, it probes into relevance theory and the production of verbal humor, second it endeavors to analyze relevance theory and the comprehension of verbal humor. The conclusion is made in the fourth part, that is, the relevance theory plays such an important and effective role in analyzing humor production that helps us comprehend English verbal humor better.

Key Words: verbal humor  relevance theory  production  comprehension

摘 要

本文运用Sperber和Wilson提出的关联理论对英语言语幽默的产生和理解方法进行了初步的探讨，共分为四部分。第一部分为绪论，包括研究动机，本论文的研究目的、意义以及对幽默的定义和分类的简要介绍。第二部分为关联理论概述，该理论为后续分析提供帮助。第三部分从关联理论的角度分析英语言语幽默：一，关联理论与言语幽默的产生；二，关联理论与言语幽默的理解。第四部分为结语，运用关联的理论可以帮助人们准确的分析幽默的产生，从而更加深刻地理解言语幽默。

关键词：英语言语幽默 关联理论 产生 理解

1 Introduction
Humor is very popular and common in our daily life and people enjoy humor because they can obtain great pleasure and relaxation from it. When talking, reading or watching, people find something funny and laugh, and define something funny as humor. After all, how to define humor, how to classify humor and how humor is produced are still worth studying.
Over the centuries, writers of diverse interests have attempted to define it, to supply reasons for it, and to analyze it. Most works on humor tend to interpret it from physiological, psychological, sociological aspects, but not from linguistic aspects. Up to now, in the field of linguistics, some explorations of humor have already been made in regard to its semantic and rhetorical aspects, but the attention has not been paid to the study of humor from the perspective of pragmatics.