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heory  

Proposed  by  Sperber  and  Wilson  in  1986,  relevance  theory  is  a  theory  about verbal comprehension. People tend to focus on and process those relevant utterances. The  hearers  comprehend  the  speakers’  utterances  with  existing  context.  The fundamental  basis  of  judging  whether  the  utterances  are  relevant  is  the  interaction between new information and existing cognitive assumptions. There are three ways to form  the  relevance:  Newly  presented  information  produces  a  contextual  implication by  combining  with  an  existing  assumption;  newly  presented  information  strengthens an existing assumption and newly presented information contradicts or eliminates an existing  assumption.  Communication  is  considered  as  a  kind  of  purposeful  human activity and an ostensive-inferential cognitive process. During the process, the speaker will  directly  express  the  optimal  relevant  assumptions  and  expectations  in  different occasions with different purposes. In conventional communication, the speaker tends to  express  in  a  direct  and  clear  way  to  build  the  optimal  relevance  which  costs  the least effort of the hearer in order to obtain the greatest contextual effect. According to Wilson, people tend to achieve the largest effects  with  the  least  efforts  in  computing cognitive  effects:  “consider  interpretive  hypotheses;  stop  when  the  expected  level  of relevance is achieved” (Wilson, 2001:8).  But relevance theory also provides a theoretical framework in the comprehension process  of  humor  in  this  thesis.  Most  studies  on  pragmatic  analysis  of  humor  is combined with deixis, premise or cooperative principle, but without the mechanism of humor,  so  how  the  hearers  obtain  the  sense  of  humor  and  how  are  the  humorous effects  produced  are  not  clear.  Usually  humor  is  expressed  indirectly  and  that  is  the spirit of humor.  

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conclusion

Although  the  study  has  some  major  findings,  there  are  also  limitations  in  the thesis. Firstly,  relevance  theory  is  a  complex  theory  system  which  involves  many contents,  and  above  all,  the  author’s  background  knowledge  and  academic competence are limited, so the understanding of the theoretical basis may be bot deep enough.  Besides,  the  research  data  is  all  from  the  talk  show  Conan,  which  covers  a limited field. So the study may be superficial and not deep eno本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。