Chapter Overview

• • communication in linguistic humour

• • cognitive stylistics

• • relevance theory

• • checklist of relevance theoretic categories

• • relevance theoretic analysis of jokes

Introduction

In the previous chapter, we introduced pragmatic stylistics, which is informed by the Gricean approach to pragmatics. In this chapter, we introduce RELEVANCE THEORY, which is a theory of communication that shares the pragmatic stylistic concern with utterance interpretation and grounding on Gricean pragmatics but offers a cognitive account of interpretation. The chapter applies the relevance theoretic cognitive framework to the analysis of jokes. After outlining the nature of communication in linguistic humour, the chapter presents the relevance theoretic framework, suggests a checklist of categories to use in analysing humorous texts using relevance theory, and offers cognitive stylistic analyses of five short jokes.

Communication in linguistic humour

Humour created in and through language is called linguistic humour. The effect in linguistic humour is not a property of the text but is best understood in terms of the mental processes the hearer goes through during interpretation (Yus 2003).

The humourist has the ability to ‘predict which mental procedures the addressee is likely to go through in the relevance-seeking extraction of the information that utterances convey’ (Yus 2003: 1308). This knowledge is manipulated to humorous effect. Let us take jokes by way of example. The language used by the humourist in the first part of a joke (the set-up) creates cognitive expectations of optimal relevance that are defeated in the second part of the joke (the punchline). That is, the set-up misleads the audience into anticipating the optimally relevant interpretation, and the punchline surprises them by revealing an interpretation that yields fewer contextual (or cognitive) effects and demands additional processing effort. To resolve the ambiguity, the audience goes back to the set-up in search of the intended meaning. Realisation of the intended interpretation resolves the ambiguity and leads to humour.

The ambiguity, or the manipulation of the communicative potential of language, operates at all levels of language structure. The joke teller could exploit the phonological, morphological, lexical, syntactic, semantic, or pragmatic possibilities for making meaning to create the incongruity between the expected optimally relevant interpretation and the intended interpretation that is inconsistent with the PRINCIPLE OF RELEVANCE.