Acknowledgments My writing of this thesis has smoothly come to an end, and I hereby would like to extend my sincere gratitude to the following people for their selfless dedication and contribution to my thesis. 38712
My profound gratitude first goes to Associate Prof. , my supervisor, for her constant guidance and encouragement in the process of my writing. She offered me considerable and constructive advice, practical and profound suggestions on the completion of my paper. Just under her careful and patient guidance, I begin to get a clear idea of the paper and fully frame it out. Without her support and help, the completion of the present thesis is impossible.
I am also grateful to my classmates and roommates for their encouragement, support, comments and wise advice.
Last, I wish to devote this paper to my parents for their everlasting dedication that they have shown since I was just a little child.
 Abstract
As a most complicated and widespread expression, humor may be one of the hardest multi—disciplinary research subjects and has attracted the attention and interests of scholars in the fields of philosophy, esthetics, psychology, physiology, sociology and linguistics, and there are great many important findings in their own fields．However among them, few studies are based on the theory of cognitive pragmatics．
This paper takes verbal humor as the object of study and tends to interpret it with relevance theory from the view of cognitive pragmatics．Sperber and Wilson’ s  relevance theory is not a theory specially designed for the analysis of humor, but its theoretical hypotheses well suited to deal with the interpretation of humorous discourse.It is based on two general principles：cognitive principle and communicative principle．The cognitive principle means that human cognition tends to be geared to the maximization of relevance while the communicative principle indicates that every act of ostensive communication communicates a presumption of its own optimal relevance．Maximal relevance and optimal relevance are the two significant conception in relevance theory．
Taking verbal humor in the famous American sitcom Friends as data, this paper points
out the conflict between maximal and optimal relevance is where humor comes out．It further verifies the corresponding theoretical hypothesis on the come—about of humor from the view of relevance theory and also supply some effective suggestions to people to understand and appreciate humor．
KEY WORDS：verbal humor, relevance theory, maximal relevance, optimal relevance
 摘要作为一种复杂但又普遍的表达方式, 幽默是最难的多学科研究课题之一, 吸引了来自哲学, 美学, 心理学, 生理学, 社会学及语言学的众多学科学者的关注与兴趣, 并拥有了大量重要的研究成果。但少数会运用认知语用学对言语幽默进行研究。
本文以言语幽默作为研究对象, 试图用认知语用学的关联理论来阐释幽默。斯波伯和威尔逊(Sperber and Wilson)的关联理论不是为分析幽默而产生的理论, 但是其中的理论假设非常适合用于解释言语幽默。关联理论以认知原则和交际原则两条原则作为基础。关联的认知原则指的是：人类认知倾向于最大关联性：交际原则指的是：任何一种明示交际行为都应假定其本身具有最佳关联性。最大关联和最佳关联是关联理论的两个关键概念。
本文以美国著名情景喜剧《老友记》中的言语幽默实例为语料, 指出言语幽默来源于最大关联和最佳关联之间的意义反差。本文对言语幽默的研究进一步验证了关联理论框架下关于幽默产生机制的理论假设, 为人们理解、欣赏言语幽默提供了一些有效建议。
毕业论文关键词：言语幽默, 关联理论, 最大关联性, 最佳关联性
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments.i
Abstractii
摘要.iii
1 Introduction.1 关联理论分析《老友记》中的言语幽默行为:http://www.751com.cn/yingyu/lunwen_37749.html