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1.1 Background of the Present Study
Humor can bring about lots of amusement, relieve the nervous tension and reducethe conflicts between people, as well as improve interpersonal relationship. Humor isa kind of living capacities and tactics as well as an attitude toward life (Yan Guanglin& Xu Tong, 2010: 121). It has been employed widely by a large number of people intheir daily life in the hope of performing its special pragmatic function in theinterpersonal communication. As an ingredient of social communication, humorpervades our life and plays an indispensible role. With the rapid development ofglobalization and its increasing influence, there are more and more chances forChinese to contact and communicate with English natives. It is necessary andpragmatic to carry out a research on English verbal humor.The studies on humor enjoy a long history, which can be traced back to the periodof Socrates and Aristotle in ancient Greece. Afterwards, humor has been researched asa topic in various fields, such as in philosophy, psychology, esthetics, literary,sociology, anthropology, linguistics and so on. But the history of studies on humorfrom the perspective of linguistics is not long and there are many questions to beresolved. Since1950s, linguistics has experienced great and rapid development. Quitea great quantity of researchers and scholars are aware of it and begin to put theirhearts into the study on humor over the last decades. Humor has been analyzed interms of figures of speech, script theories and systemic-functional linguistics. Themost famous research findings are Raskin’s Semantic Script Theory of Humor in1985 and Attardo and Raskin’s General Theory of Verbal Humor in 1991. Buttraditional semantic analysis can not show how linguistic meaning interacts withcontextual assumptions during the utterance interpretation (Yus, 2003: 1295). Thenwith the upsurge of pragmatics, humor has been studied in the broader and deeperrange. Particularly, there is a fast and outstanding progress in the field of pragmaticsin recent years and humor has drawn pragmatics experts’ widespread attention. Thestudies on humor in early time range from Grice’s conversational implication theory,Austin’s speech act theory to other theories. Furthermore, some books on humor havebeen published, which explain humor in complete and detailed ways from differentviews of pragmatics.Relevance Theory (RT), established by Sperber and Wilson in 1986, makes a stir incognitive pragmatics. https://www.51lunwen.org/languagethesis/org201211092221127929.htmlIt holds that humorous effect emerges when the author violatesdeliberately or subconsciously the principles of relevance by providing a lessaccessible utterance or offering insufficient cognitive context for the reader to makemore processing efforts in interpreting verbal humor. It provides a new scientificviewpoint for the study on verbal humor and it lifts the humor study into a new height.And thus RT has aroused great concerns of many researchers in the field of cognitivepragmatics to study on verbal humor.

1.2 Objectives and Significance of the Study
This thesis chooses English verbal humor as the research object and studies itwithin RT in the hope of analyzing the two research questions: 1) How is thehumorous effect produced in the framework of RT? 2) From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。