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The Analysis on English Puns from the Perspective of Relevance Theory

Author: Zhang
Tutor: YangChaoJun
School: Henan University
Course: Foreign Linguistics and Applied Linguistics
Keywords: the pun relevance ostensive-inferential communication the double contexts the optimal relevance functions
CLC: H313
Type: Master's thesis
Year: 2009
Downloads: 824
Quote: 1
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Abstract


The present study tries to make a qualitative analysis of puns in literature, advertisement and riddles based on the Relevance Theory. The pun is a special language phenomenon with a long history. For the puns in English, they are formed by combining certain contexts with the homophonic or homographic words in the development of English so that two meanings are given birth to at the same time, i.e., surface meaning and deep meaning, which will naturally lead to more than one interpretation for the actual communication. And the pun has many different functions, such as brevity, humor, satire, persuasion, forming riddles and so on. It is these functions that greatly enhance the vitality and implicitness of language.With the development of society, puns have penetrated in all kinds of fields in life. Therefore, puns have attracted more and more attention of the scholars, and more studies have been done. However, from the research situation on puns during the recent years, it will be noticed that almost all their studies, mainly from the perspective of rhetorics, Stylistics and semantics, are concerned about the puns’ usages or functions in rhetoric. In the pragmatic field, the study usually focuses on the general discussion of the classification and pragmatic functions of puns, and as for the study of puns on a concrete layer or field, it is mentioned just a little. Besides, as for the research on the aspect of generative mechanism and understanding of the puns from the aspect of pragmatics, there is just a fragmentary mention, far from being unsystematic and imperfect. In light of this, the thesis, based on Sperber and Wilson’s Relevance Theory (1989), employs a great amount of examples to explore some characteristics peculiar to the pun. The thesis mainly intends to discuss the following two questions:1. Why do people still prefer puns in their daily communication since puns are ambiguous in meaning.2. As puns are ubiquitous in life, it is impossible for us to present an overall analysis about all kinds of language phenomena of puns. Therefore, the author just attempts to display an analysis on how puns are understood successfully by the addressee in literature, advertisement and riddles and eventually realize the addresser’s communicative intention. In light of this, the author tries to analyze the two questions following such an arrangement: the first question will be analyzed encircling the principle of Relevance, the functions of the pun and context, which aims at showing the reason why people like using puns in the actual communication lies in the polysemy and humor of the pun itself and its various functions such as satiric effect, persuasive effect and provoking thought effect and so on, all of which to some degree increase the interest of the communication. And it is also because of this, the pun can attract so much attention from people in life. Of course, this is just a primary analysis of the pun. For the second question, the author will begin the analysis from the double contexts of the pun, and then conduct ostensive inference and find out the relevance and, through the inferences drawn and the processing efforts paid out, the optimal relevance finally is gained, which makes sure the realization of the communicative intention. This to some degree makes it clear that relevance may be the soul of the pun. That is to say, people’s interpretations for puns are not discretional, instead they are gained by associating puns with the concrete contexts so as to look for the relevance in the communication and furthermore obtain the optimal relevance in the process of inference, this eventually makes sure the realization of the communicative intention. Therefore, it could be said that it will be impossible for people to understand puns correctly without certain association. This is a further and deeper analysis of puns in literature, advertisement and riddles. This perspective to some degree could be said brand-new; it is a dynamic interpretation of puns from the pragmatic level, which has a great difference from the former study.Though this thesis is far from perfection, the analysis of puns in literature, advertisement and riddle to some degree can not only deepen the people’s understanding of puns but also enable people to make a better use of puns in actual communication.

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CLC: > Language, writing > FOREIGN > English > Semantics,vocabulary,semantic
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