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Part 1 Introduction

1.1 The Background of the Research
Humor is an art form of language which often emerges in daily verbalcommunication. Humor has magical effects including relieving sadness, coolingecstasy, smoothing the social relationship and alleviating the nervous atmosphere incommunication. Due to its benefits and charming features, many researchers at homeand abroad have paid their attention to the study of it. Obviously, the author is noexception.The research on humor actually has gone a long way which can be dated back to thetimes of Aristotle in Greek. Later, with the constant collaboration of multi-disciplines,it develops quickly and forms different opinions and theories. The early research onhumor is from the perspective of psychology including the superiority theory, theincongruity theory and the relief theory, and then from the field of aesthetics, rhetoricand sociology etc. Until ten years before 1980s, the linguistic research on humorshowed its appearance and made its progress at a high speed and then blossom inwidth and depth nowadays. Among them, the Semantic Script Theory of Humor(SSTH) presented by Raskin and the General Theory of Verbal Humor (GTVH) byRaskin and Attardo stands out. Besides, the Cooperative Principle andConversational Implicature in the field of pragmatics are frequently quoted to explainthe humorous phenomenon. And recently, the perspective has been shifted to thecognitive mode and mental mechanism. However, humor is “a complex andparadoxical phenomenon” (Linstead, 2010: 23), there is no unified definition ortheory towards humor. As the Goethe once said that it’s inevitable and normal thatanything worthy of thinking about has been reflected on by others. What people needto do is to give a new deliberation or review. A large number of humorous utterancesthat are gone through by us everyday are verbal in essence. Thus, for this study,humor is restricted to verbal humor only.
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1.2 The Purpose and Significance of the Research
By researching the subject, the author wants to have a clear and comprehensiveunderstanding of verbal humor. The comprehending process and producing strategiesof English verbal humor is studied by means of relevance-theoretical opinions andtheories. On the one hand, humor is regarded as the production of wisdom and who isadept at using humor is considered to be rich in wisdom; on the other hand, ifhumorous utterance can not be understood by the recipient, there will be no humor.Thus, the successful reading of humor is also the key to humorous effects. In otherwords, the humorous effects are realized by the joint efforts of both parties. However,in terms of the Relevance Theory which is an influential theory in pragmatics,whether it had the explanatory power on English verbal humor and what’s themechanism of this theory in explaining the production and interpretation of humor aswell as what’s the impediment element in comprehending foreign humors. These areall the main concerns of this study.
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Part 2 Theoretical Framework and Related Literature

2.1 Theoretical Framework
Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson firstly co-worked to put forward the RelevanceTheory in their monograph Relevance: Communication and Cognition in 1986 andthen published the revis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。