A Study of the Humor Aspect of English Puns: Views from the Relevance Theory.

A distinctive rhetorical device, puns are wittily applied in advertisements, daily conversations, riddles, etc. Formed by the combination in certain contexts with polysemic or homophonic words, puns naturally lead to more than one interpretation in an actual communication. Puns have many different functions in utterances as well. In this paper Sperber and Wilson's Relevance Theory is used to analyze how the humor effects of puns are constructed. In the process of comprehending a pun, the audience decodes the communicator's ostensive utterance in its a context. If the context contradicts the usual interpretation, the audience rebuilds a new assumption with their encyclopedic knowledge, logical and lexical information, and deduces the real implication of the utterance-and appreciates the great humor effects of English puns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]