从关联理论看言语幽默

A Study of Verbal Humor
from the Perspective of Relevance Theory
Author: Li Yixian
Tutor: Li Xiang
(College of Foreign Languages, Hunan Agricultural University, Changsha 410128 )
Abstract：Verbal humor is a usual phenomenon in human communication.It has attracted the attension of many researchers in many fields such as philosophy, aesthetics ,physiology, sociology, psychology and linguistics. In the field of linguistics, some explorations have already been made in regard to its semantic and rhetorical aspects,but due attention has not been paid to it in pragmatics in that in everyday verbal communication, humorous utterances are easy to enjoy but hard to define. Apart from its capability of laughter-making, language humor is more often than not, produced to implicitly perform some communicative functions, not achievable by explicit expressions. Relevance Theory was put forward by Sperber and Wilson in 1986 aims to explain how the audience infers the communicator's intended meaning. In this paper, a cognitive approach to humor is adopted within the framework of the Relevance Theory to elaborate the realizing process of verbal humor and learn how to appreciate verbal humor.
Key words: Verbal Humor; Relevance Theory; Cognitive Effects; Processing Effort
从关联理论看言语幽默
作者：李怡娴
指导老师：李湘
（湖南农业大学外国语学院，长沙 410128）
摘要：言语幽默是人们的交际行为中一种常见的语言现象，许多学者已从心理学，社会学等方面进行过广泛而深入的研究。

在语言学方面，也从语义修辞的角度进行了详细的探讨，然而语用学这一语言学的分支，还未对幽默语言的研究引起高度注意，原因在于在日常交际中，幽默语言易于欣赏，却难于把握。

幽默语言不但生动有趣，另人捧腹，而且更主要的是在引人发笑的过程中还传递着其他的交际含义或意图。

关联理论于1986年由Sperber和Wilson提出，它旨在揭示听话
者对发话者话语意义的推理理解过程。

本文以关联理论为分析工具，从认知的角度出发，对言语幽默的实现过程进行分析研究,阐述了幽默发出者交际意图的实现过程，从而揭示了在关联理论视角下的幽默的产生，并学会如何欣赏言语幽默。

关键词：言语幽默;关联理论;语境效果;处理努力
Introduction
In our daily life ,‘humor’is a word that is frequently used. People enjoy humor because they can derive great pleasure and relaxation from it .Over the centuries, writers of diverse interests have attempted to define it, to supply reasons for it, and to analyze it. Nevertheless, most works on humor tend to be concerned with themes such as its physiological, psychological and sociological aspects and in comparison fewer in history have worked on the linguistic aspects of the comic mode. It is certainly not the case that no attention has been paid to linguistic investigations of humor. However, if we compare the efforts in this area with efforts in other research areas such as translation theory and practice, American and British literature and teaching methodology, then we have to admit that the amount of attention is still minimal.
Up to now, a great deal of research has been done from the viewpoint of psychology and sociology. In the field of linguistics, some explorations have already been made in regard to its semantic and rhetorical aspects, but due attention has not been paid to it in pragmatics.
In the eighties of last century, cognitive pragmatics arose when the cognitive study of language in communication became increasingly important in the field of the present cognitive linguistics. Relevance Theory (RT), put forward by Sperber and Wilson, is the basis of cognitive pragmatics. Mainly concerned with communication and cognition, RT tries to reveal the nature of communication and provide a psychological explanation of the interpretation unfolded in the audience's mind.
Basically, we could divide humor into verbal humor, visual humor and physical humor. Verbal humor is a usual phenomenon in human communication. It is an interdisciplinary subject connected with a wide range of learning. As a special kind of verbal communication, verbal humor can avoid embarrassment, and improve the relationship of the different people.
The study of verbal humor is of great practical value. Relevance Theory (RT) provides a brand new angle to interpret verbal humor, that is,from the cognitive point of view. It is not a theory specially designed for the analysis of verbal humor, but its theoretical hypotheses are suitable to deal with how humorous utterances are produced and interpreted.
This thesis attempts to explain the procedure of production and understanding from the cognitive perspective with the support of Relevance Theory. By using the two principles the maximal relevance(cognitive principle) and optimal relevance(communicative principle), it tries to reveal the essence of verbal humor: the transition from the maximal relevance to the optimal relevance.
This thesis comprises the four parts:Part one introduces the notion about humor and reviews related literature on verbal humor from the angles of pragmatics. Part two describes the relevance theory, including the definition of relevance, context, two principles of relevance, cognitive effect and processing effort, and optimal relevance.Part three analyzes the production and the comprehension of verbal humor on the basis of relevance theory. Part four gives a conclusion to the whole paper.
1 Overview of Verbal Humor
In this section , introduces the definition about “humor”explored first. Then literary review on the notion of verbal humor is presented.
1.1 Humor
To give humor an exact definition is not so easy. For many centuries, the researchers including philosophers, psychologists, aestheticians, sociologists have been trying their best to define it. It turns out quite a few definitions but there is no one that can meet with everybody's satisfaction. However, people have not been defeated by the difficulties they have met with in their course of defining. On the contrary, they are still on their way of trying to give it a scientific definition.
Mindess (1971) defines humor as “a frame of mind, a manner of perceiving and experiencing life. It is a kind of outlook, a peculiar point of view and one which has great therapeutic power”. Fry says, “humor is play”[1]. “A joke may be defined as an item of humor reduced to a si ngle point or particle”, writes Leac ock in an unfunny tone (1937), “It represents the breaking up of humorous matter into its elements so that one can examine and
appreciate one little bit of it without any extraneous context. One might say that a joke is a self-contained humorous thought”.[2] Koestler (1974) provides us the entry of‘humor‟ with a concrete definition as a type of stimulation that tends to elicit the laughter reflex.
Given the fact that there exist diverse ideas concerning what humor is, but no single definition has been widely accepted, we hold the view that no single definition can describe or explain adequately what humor is. Different ideas on the issue “what humor is”may hold or be validate only within certain specific fields, but not necessarily all disciplines.
1.2 Verbal Humor
As to the classifications of humor, we are going to divide humor into two groups: situational-oriented humor and linguistic-oriented humor, or in other words, situational humor and verbal humor. According to Pocheptsov, humor categorized into two major groups-situational humor and language humor also can be verbal humor. Since situational humor has little to do with language, it will not be taken into account in this dissertation. Therefore, this dissertation is chiefly limited to the latter kind-verbal humor. For the purpose of this dissertation, in which verbal humor is the class of humor we are interested in, we tentatively define verbal humor as a type of communication which :(a) establishes a kind of amusing or absurd incongruity; and (b) is conveyed in language.
The object of the research is the joke-carrying text, in which the text other than any non-verbal situation is the initiator of the joke. Since it is easier to introduce a new theory by illustrating it with the help of simple samples, the emphasis is placed in the dissertation on the most elementary, self-contained, conversational joke.
2 Relevance Theory: A Brief Survey
Relevance theory was formally proposed by Dan Spenser and British scholar Deirdre Wilson in their book Relevance: communication and cognition in 1986 and the second edition in 1995.It is actually based on Grice‟s Cooperative Principle (CP) theory, and reduces all the maxims to a single principle-the principle of relevance.
Relevance theory is not a rule-based or maxim-based system. It is based on a very few simple ideas. First, that every utterance has a variety of possible interpretations (that is, different combinations of explicit context, context, and implicatures), all compatible with the information that is linguistically encoded. Second, that not all these interpretations are
equally accessible to the hearer on any given occasion. Third, that the hearers are equipped with a single, very general criterion for evaluating interpretations as they occur to them. Forth, that this criterion is powerful enough to exclude all but at most a single possible interpretation so that the hearer is entitled to assume that the first interpretation that meets the criterion is the only one.
The criterion proposed in Relevance develops from a basic assumption about human cognition, that is “human cognition is relevance-oriented: we pay attention only to the inform ation that seems relevant to us”[3]. Now in verbal communication, every utterance starts out as a request for the hearer's attention. It is supposed to create an expectation of relevance. It is around this expectation of relevance that a new explanatory pragmatic theory is built.
2. 1 Definition of Relevance
Relevance is defined by Sperber and Wilson(1986) in terms of cognitive effects and processing effort. Cognitive effects are achieved when newly-presented information interacts with a context of existing assumptions in one of the following three ways:
(a) By strengthening an existing assumption.
(b) By contradicting and eliminating an existing assumption.
(c) By combining with an existing assumption to yield a contextual implication(that is, conclusions derived from new information and context together, but from neither new information nor context alone).
Other things being equal, the greater the cognitive effects achieved by processing the new information, the greater its relevance. However, the processing of the new information and deriving of these cognitive effects, involve some mental effort, and the greater the effort required to derive them, the lower the relevance will be. The processing effort needed to understand an utterance depends on two main factors: first, the effort of memory and imagination needed to construct a suitable context; second, the complexity of the utterance itself. Greater complexity implies greater processing effort. The greater the processing effort, the lower the relevance will be, and the greater risk of losing the hearer's attention:
Relevance
(a) The greater the cognitive effects, the greater the relevance.
(b) The smaller the processing effort, the greater the relevance.
2. 2 Context
Context is a very important notion that directly comes from pragmatics. Anyone who wants to study human communication should not neglect it. Traditionally, it is viewed as a given one, i.e. it is determined in advance of the comprehension process. That is to say, there exists a certain context before an utterance is processed. According to relevance theory, context is not fixed in advance. It is seen as a dynamic one and a matter of choice, and the selection of a particular context is determined by the search for relevance. That is to say, what the recipient expects is that the stimulus, which will be processed, is a relevant one, and he/she tries to choose a context in which that expectation can be justified; namely, he/she achieves a context that will maximize relevance.
As stated previously, in relevance theory, relevance is treated as given, and context is regarded as a variable. Whether the hearer can select a correct context has a direct influence on the interpretation of the utterance. So context section plays a significant role in utterance interpretation. According to Sperber and Wilson, con text is “a psychological construct, a subset of the hearer's assumptions about the world", "the set of premises used in interpreting an utt erance”. [4]
A context in this sense is not limited to information about the immediate
physical environment of theimmediately preceding utterances, and it
perhaps include expectations about the future, scientific hypotheses or
religious beliefs, anecdotal memories, general cultural assumptions, beliefs
about the mental state of the speaker, may all play a role in interpretation.[5]
That's to say, assumptions can be drawn from “the preceding text, or from observation of the and what is going o n in the immediate environment”and can also be drawn "from cultural or scientific knowledge, assumptions, and any item of shared or idiosyncratic information”that the hearer has access to at that moment.
2.3 Principles of Relevance
In the second edition of Relevance:Communication and Cognition ,Sperber&Wilson propose two principles of relevance, one governing cognition and the other communication: “First, or cognitive principle of relevance:Human cognition tends to be geared to the
maximization of relevance;Second,or communicative principle of relevance:Every act of ostensive communication communicates a presumption of its own optimal relevance.”[6] The two authors distinguish relevance into the maximal relevance and optimal relevance. The maximal relevance means in the interpretation process, getting the greatest contextual effects for the smallest possible effort. When the speaker intends to communicate a set of assumptions, of course, the hearer hopes that assumptions should be the most relevant information available to the speaker. However, the interests of the speaker and the hearer may not be same. Whatever the hearer demands, it's impossible for us to hope that the speaker could always utter the maximal relevant sentences.The speaker perhaps doesn't want to or can't or needn't give the maximal relevant information. Moreover, the most relevant utterance that the speaker can produce may still fail to be relevant enough to be worth the hearer's attention.
2.4 Cognitive Effect and Processing Effort
Of course, it is important to clarify the notion of‘communication‟involved on the purpose of understanding the communicative principle of relevance. Sperber and Wilson are interested in a notion of communication that involves …ostensive‟ behavior: that is, behavior intended to attract an audience's attention to some phenomena. As noted above, they claim that ostensive behavior automatically creates a presumption of optimal relevance, i.e. an expectation that the ostensive stimulus will be relevant enough to be worth the audience's attention. The audience's task is then to work out how the ostensive stimulus e.g. the utterance-was intended to be relevant. The heart of RT is its novel definition of relevance.
Sperber and Wilson's notion of relevance is defined by further two notions: cognitive effects and processing effort. Cognitive effects result from an interaction of new and old information. Three types of interaction are envisaged. Newly presented information may:
(a). combine with an existing assumption to yield contextual implications;
(b).strengthen existing assumptions;
(c). contradict and eliminate existing assumptions.
Sperber and Wilson suggest a fourth type of contextual effect in the second edition of Relevance, namely weakening of existing assumptions. They consider it to be “a by-product of a more basic contextual effect: for example, contradiction and elimination of an existing assumption weakens all contextual implications which depended on that assumption for
some support”. [7]
The second factor, which contributes to relevance, the processing effort involved in interpreting an utterance can be described as the mental effort needed to parse it, to decide what proposition and prepositional attitude it was intended to express, to access an appropriate context, and to work out its intended cognitive effects in that context.The notion of processing effort then depends on several factors, not all of which are equally well understood. In experimental psychology, studies on various aspects of comprehension provide an useful index of processing effort; however, other factors, such as level of concentration or alertness, should also be taken into account. Moreover, while various experimental indexes of processing effort suggested by psychologists are useful guides, what is ultimately important is the way the human mind assesses its own efforts. According to Sperber and Wilson, this is done in a comparative rather than a quantitative way, working better in some situation than others. The more information the mind is required to process, the more effort is needed, and the more contextual assumptions it has to access, the more effort is consumed. Other factors which affect processing effort include recency of mention; frequency of mention; linguistic complexity; logical complexity and accessibility of contextual assumptions.
Having introduced the notions of cognitive effects and processing effort, Sperber and Wilson use them to define various notions of relevance. While contextual effect is a positive factor of relevance, processing effort is a negative one: other things being equal, the greater the cognitive effects achieved by processing effort required, the less relevant it will be. Thus in this sense, relevance is a matter of degree which can be defined in terms of contextual effect and processing effort. The assessment of relevance is a matter of balancing contextual effects against processing effort. As a psychological property, it is not a quantitative concept. Clear comparisons can be made possible only under restricted circumstances: other things being equal, an assumption requiring a small processing effort is more relevant. The maximally relevant item of information is the one that yields the greatest possible cognitive effects in return for the smallest possible processing effort. According to Sperber and Wilson, though, the addressee of an act of ostensive-inferential communication is not always entitled to expect the maximally relevant information, since the speaker may be unwilling or unable to give it. He is,however, entitled to expect optimally relevant information.
2. 5 Optimal Relevance
Though contextual effect and processing effort influence the degree of relevance respectively from the positive and negative respects, what attracts the hearer's attention is not the maximum relevance (to get the maximum contextual effect with the minimum processing effort). In order to avoid possible misunderstanding of this kind, relevance theory raises the notion of …optimal relevance‟. [8] There are two criteria for achieving the optimal relevance in the process of utterance interpretation:
(a) .The utterance achieves enough contextual effects to be worth the hearer's attention;
(b). The utterance puts the hearer to no gratuitous effort in achieving those contextual effects.
Let's discuss the criterion (a) first. What the hearers strive for is the best contextual effect. Whether the contextual effect is good or not is determined by the hearer's cognition of the existing contextual assumptions. This problem can be illustrated by the following example taken from He Ziran. [9]
eg. Suppose a person is entering a lecture hall and is expected t deliver a formal speech there. But on the rostrum the first utterance he gives to the audience is:
(1) Ladies and gentlemen, I have to tell you that the building's on fire
In this utterance, “the building” has its specific referent; different referents can lead to different contextual effects. In the case under discussion, the first contextual assumption that occurs to the audience is:
(2) The building' in the speaker's utterance refers to the right building where they have been waiting for a lecture.
Evidently, once the audience got such kind of cognition about the context, they will infer the following contextual effect without much effort:
(3) The right building where they are is on fire
Naturally, this contextual effect is strong enough to arouse the audience's attention. Their immediate response must be to plan how to flee out of the burning building rather than do what audience should do in normal case: listen to the addresser's lecture attentively and not to be disturbed by other irrelevant topics. The utterance itself in this case indicates that it does not belong to the normal lectures of the addresser, so it results in a contextual effect that is totally different from what the context of a normal lecture would result in.
Let's go further to discuss the second criterion for optimal relevance. In some cases, the hearer should put in a lot of effort for interpreting the speaker's communicative intention. A context can be combined with the information of an utterance in different ways and thus produces totally different contextual effects. For illustration:
(4) There's someone behind you.
May this utterance be an assumption or warning? Let's see another example:
(5) John's coming.
What kind of feeling or attitude is intended to express in this utterance: surprise, satisfaction, anticipation, promise or warning?
For both (4) and (5), if combined with different contextual assumptions, they will result in different contextual effects. What the hearer strives for is to achieve the best contextual effects while investing no unnecessary effort in the process of reasoning and inference. This purpose can be achieved only when turning to the context of the utterances for help.
On the speaker's side, in order not to cause misunderstandings, he should make his intention manifest to his hearer. To put across his communicative intention, the speaker could substitute the following ostensive expressions respectively for (4) and (5):
(6) a. Suppose that there is someone behind you. (an assumption)
b. I warn you that there is someone behind you. (a warning)
(7) a. I promise that John is coming. (a promise)
b. Is John coming? (a suuprise)
With the ostensive expressions (6a-b) and (7a-b), the speakers can put their intentions across to the hearers and put the hearers to no gratuitous effort in achieving adequate contextual effects.The hearers, on the other hand, can achieve optimal relevance from the information of these utterances and their contextual assumptions without experiencing too complicated reasoning and inference as they should do for (4) and (5).
However,not every utterance can achieve optimal relevance. Suppose A is preparing to go out, B reminds him that it is raining outside, but A has known this information already. In this case, B's utterance cannot produce his expected contextual effect, that is, to change A's cognitive environment. But B's utterance can nevertheless be understood and accepted by A, because A knows that B's utterance is relevant to the context under discussion.
3Application of Relevance Theory to the Study of Verbal Humor Relevance theory is a cognitive-oriented theory of human communication. It serves as a cognitive approach to humor in which a mental search for an optimally relevant interpretation covers the processing of humorous discourses and the derivation of humorous effects. When applied to the study of verbal humor, the relevant theory offers the best theoretical framework for the present study.
3.1 Relevance-theoretic interpretation of verbal humor production
It follows from the Cognitive Principle of Relevance that human attention and processing resources tend to be allocated to information that seems maximally relevant. That is, the hearer's interest is to have the greatest possible effects for the smallest possible effort. This principle governs and predicts human's cognitive behavior, and therefore, sets a line along which overt communication is supposed to proceeds. It has been noted that communicators, for whatever reasons, are not always expected to give the most relevant possible information, as a presumption of maximal relevance would suggest. It follows from the Communicative Principle of Relevance that, a speaker, by the very act of addressing someone,creates an expectation of optimal relevance.That is,an utterance,once communicated, is supposed to achieve adequate effects for no unjustifiable effort, and is moreover, the most relevant utterance the speaker is willing and able to produce.
Humor created in language communication generally starts out with a communicative background, and is made up of two parts. With the new information in the first part interacting with his existing assumptions, the hearer gets adequate effects (which are enough to satisfy his expectation or relevance), and then spontaneously predicts what the speaker is most likely to utter later, since his attention is geared to the maximization of relevance. To his surprise, the utterance actually produced by the speaker in the next part is radically different from what he has expected. Then laughter arises from a sudden awareness that he has been misled by the speaker or has interpreted the former utterance of the speaker along the wrong line. What leads to the wrong assumption of the hearer is his expectation to have the most relevant information. That is, engaged in a process of overt communication, the hearer tends to expect his partner to make every utterance maximally relevant, from which he is capable of obtaining the greatest possible effects for the smallest effort. However, communication permits the speaker to offer information of merely optimal relevance.
Because he is either unwilling or unable to, the speaker prefers to avoid expressing himself in the least effort-demanding way. It is just the disparity between the hearer's expectation of maximal relevance and the speaker's actual optimal relevance that often gives rise to incongruity in communication, and consequently humorous effects. Consider the following example:
About two weeks before our fifth anniversary, my husband asked me what I would like for a gift. I told him I wanted something impractical and romantic. On our anniversary eve, he presented me with a lovely gold bracelet. “A word o f four letters made me buy it.”He said. “Oh, how sweet.” I whispered.“L-O-V-E?”“No,” he replied.“S-A-L-E.”
Before celebrating their fifth anniversary, the husband had considerately asked the wife what she would like for a gift, and finally came back with a lovely gold bracelet, which was just as impractical and romantic as she expected. With such a background in mind, the wife, together with the audience would reasonably assume that the husband deeply loved his wife and wanted to please her with the present. Therefore, when he posed the question, the most relevant ans wer occurred to her would be “love”, for this simple word, combined with the existing assumption of the wife, is to achieve the greatest possible effect for the smallest processing effort. Nevertheless, out of her expectation, the word virtually spelled out by her husband is not “love” but “sale”, which is also a little four-letter word. Till now, his witty answer contradicts and eliminates his wife's assumption, achieving its optimal relevance with additional humorous effects: the wife first felt surprised, then would burst out into laughter. Consider the other two examples here:
Mark Twain once said to a woman sitting opposite to him,
“Y ou are really beautiful, madam.”
“I'm sorry, I really can not flatter you in the same terms as you do to me,” the
woman replied arrogantly.
“That does not matter,” Mark Twain commented, “anyway, you can lie as I do.”
Out of everyone's expectation, Mark Twain's sincere compliment was confronted with。