A Study of Verbal Humor in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer from the Perspective of Relevance Theory 关联理论视角下《汤姆·索亚历险记》中的言语幽默研究开题报告

 2023-04-10 16:57:06

1. 研究目的与意义（文献综述包含参考文献）

1.Introduction1.1 Research background Humor is an indispensable part of human life and communication. As an artistically processed language form, its essence is a kind of artistic language. Based on this language form, countless literary works, film and television works and works of art can be created. Humor is roughly divided into three parts: verbal humor, visual humor and humorous behavior. As the most important phenomenon in human communication, it can help people maintain an optimistic and positive attitude towards life. The correct use of humorous language strategy has become a crucial way for people to establish social relations, ease tension, solve contradictions and relax their mood. Therefore, it is necessary to study verbal humor to reveal the inner nature of verbal humor and better understand the mechanism of humor. The study of humor has a long history. Up to now, there are more than 200 theories studying the factors of humor from different perspectives (Xiang, 2010). Don s a theory that is analyzed based on the concept of relevance and relevance principle. In Relevance Theory, relevance is seen as a characteristic of words, thoughts, actions, situations, etc. that is input into the cognitive process.The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, published in 1876, is written by American novelist Mark Twain, which has great influence in the history of literature. Mark Twain used a variety of rhetorical devices and humorous language forms to express the irony and criticism of social reality in his novel, which has great research significance to study.1.2 Purpose of the studyThe thesis of this paper focused on the extended study based on the study of western humor theory. On the basis of the main points and concepts of Relevance Theory, this paper takes the American writer Mark Twain's novel The Adventures of Tom Sawyer as the research corpus to study the production mechanism, understanding process and strategies of verbal humor in order to better understand how the effect of humor in Mark Twain's great literary works is achieved, the paper also hopes to have a research significance for the study of verbal humor related to Relevance Theory from the perspective of pragmatics.This paper attempts to use Relevance Theory to explain the humor phenomenon in this kind of American humor literature, hoping to help readers to better read humorous literary works, and to guide readers to understand Mark Twain's works from the perspective of linguistics. Its also hoped that special perspectives of pragmatics should be given to analyze and criticize such literature works. 2.Literature review2.1 Definition of verbal humorHumor is one of humans unique qualities, abilities and ways of communication (Wei, 2015). According to the relationship between humor and language, humor can be divided into verbal humor and non-verbal humor (Liu Xiong, 2003). As a branch of humor, verbal humor exists widely in people's daily conversations and literary works. Verbal humor is not only a linguistic phenomenon but also a thinking phenomenon, it can bring laughter and pleasure to people with humorous or ironic words and its an important form of human creative communication and a symbol of human wisdom as well. Verbal humor in this paper refers to the humorous utterances spoken on a certain occasion which can bring people laughter and joyful feelings. The humorous effects are achieved by means of the rhetorical devices and writing techniques in verbal humor.2.2 Definition of Relevance TheoryFormally proposed by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson in their book: Relevance: Communication and Cognition in 1986. Relevance Theory is a very general treatise on communication and cognition, covering not only many research topics in modern pragmatics, but also modern interaction theories. Relevance Theory, based on the characteristics of human cognition, regards communication as a cognitive activity and holds that human cognition has a general goal, that is, to achieve the maximum effect with the minimum effort in the cognitive process. Therefore, people always focus their attention on the most relevant information and establish assumptions based on the principle of optimal relevance in the process of processing information. Sperber and Wilson believe that although language can be used for communicative purpose, its communicative function has not revealed the essential features of language. In their opinion, the essence of language in human activities is cognition. Cognition is to absorb information and to obtain knowledge. So the basic function of language is to retrieve and process information. Thus Relevance Theory regard communicative activities, whether verbal or nonverbal, as cognitive activities. The intention of speaker can be perceived by the audience because of the shared cognitive environment. The results of communication will depend on the mutual manifestation of each others cognitive environment. Human cognition tends to be geared to the principle of relevance, and the comprehension of utterances follow the ostensive-inferential model. There are two principles included in Relevance Theory: cognitive principle and communicative principle. The first one means that human cognition tends to coincide with the maximum degree of relevance; the second means that every utterance(or other act of osensive-inferential communication)should be assumed to have the optimal relevance of the utterance or act itself.2.3 Review of relevant studiesThe linguistic studies on humor have been carried out from many aspects, such as phonetics, lexicology, and syntax. The most extensive study of humor is one from the perspective of semantics which centers on the semantic aspects of humor, such as the semantic structure, the rhetoric devices, and genres, etc. Among these studies, the most well-known studies is the Semantic Script Theory of Humor(SSTH)proposed by Raskin in 1985. In this theory, the script opposition is regarded as the central concern. The theory attempts to analyze the text of jokes rather than the psychological or social factors involved, which is its weakness and deficiencies. In 1991, Raskin and Attardo developed this theory and put forward the General Theory of Verbal Humor(GTVH). It proposed that verbal humor has five sourcesspeeches, narrative strategies, conversation objects, circumstances and logical structures, through which script opposition is formed. This theory has a strong explanatory power in explaining humorous situations, but the two theories above can not cover all humorous phenomena and language alone cannot make clear the complex nature of humor in spite of the profound achievements obtained, so a more comprehensive and pragmatic view is necessary in the verbal humor study.In recent years, a variety of studies of humor from the perspective of pragmatics have been carried out. In the aspect of pragmatics, humor was considered as the application and the transfer object of verbal communication among different pragmatic mechanisms and discourses. In pragmatics, theories are employed to explore humorous languages. Due to important theoretical value and piratical significance, the following two theories are used most: Cooperative Principle(CP) from Grice and Relevance Theory(RT) from Sperber and Wilson. In the Cooperative Principle, humor is seen as a result of violating maxims of quantity, quality, relation and manner. The speaker may deliberately disobey the Cooperative Principle so as to result in the conversational implicature. The same principles also apply to humorous utterances. Humorous effects are created when the speaker violates them intentionally. Cooperative Principle has attracted many scholars to use it to explain humor. Though Cooperative Principle is powerful to explain many humorous utterances, there are still some unreliabilities of it. For example, the cooperation sometimes fails to work if the speaker doesnt violate the maxims. Besides, Cooperative Principle doesnt account for how the hearers interpret the humorous utterances.Under this circumstances, Relevance Theory evolves from Cooperative Principle. Relevance Theory intends to improve Gricean maxims in Cooperative Principle by reducing redundant maxims to one single principle, it has arisen heated discussions for years since it was first published. According to Relevance Theory, humorous effects result from the disparity between the maximal relevance the hearers are looking forward to and the actual optimal relevance the communicator expresses. With regard to how the hearer understands the humor can be well explained within Relevance Theory and the main claims of Relevance Theory are applicable for the study of verbal humor.Since Relevance Theory was introduced into China, there have been many articles related to its introduction and commentary. More and more scholars have made use of Relevance Theory to conduct discourse analysis, mainly in the field of foreign language literary works, which is manifested in the use of Relevance Theory to study foreign language pragmatic phenomena or translation theories.At the same time, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is a very representative humorous literary work. Previous studies on this work are mostly based on literary appreciation, researchers seldom study from the pragmatic theory of linguistics. Through the analysis of the humorous utterances in the novel from the perspective of Relevance Theory, this paper hopes to bring innovation and enlightenment to the study of literary works from the perspective of pragmatics in the future.2.4 Research gapAt present, the research angles of humor study in China are mainly carried out in the following aspects: the research on the production of humor, the research on the understanding of verbal humor, and the research on humor application. Compared with research abroad, domestic research is still one-sided and scattered in some way. This paper holds the opinion that there are three advantages in the study of verbal humor from the perspective of Relevance Theory of pragmatics: firstly, Relevance Theory itself is an interdisciplinary theory that integrates the views of cognitive linguistics, pragmatics, psychology, philosophy and other disciplines, and its main points are convincing and can be supported by the research results of other disciplines; secondly, Relevance Theory is based on the cognitive theory. The theory which studies the whole process of human communication and speech understanding is relatively completed; as verbal humor is one part of human communication in nature, its understanding process is similar to that of general speech. The study of verbal humor from the perspective of Relevance Theory can not only prove its universality, but also find its particularity. The research conclusion of this paper will then be more powerful and more completed.

2. 研究的基本内容、问题解决措施及方案

The present paper makes research on how verbal humor is carried out in humorous literature works. The thesis focuses on how Relevance Theory is applied to explain the working mechanism of verbal humor in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain.The paper takes the American writer Mark Twains novel The Adventures of Tom Sawyer as the research corpus. On the basis of reading the full novel, the paper starts from the writing techniques and rhetorical devices which are used in the novel. Whats more, based on the Relevance Theory, this paper selects several representative conversations for further analysis. The research of this paper adopts the quantitative research method by observation and analysis of humorous utterances in the research corpus in order to reveal the application of Relevance Theory in verbal humor.

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