A Study of Verbal Humor in Public Speech from the Perspective of Relevance Theory and Cooperative Principle--Taking TED Talks as An Example

Verbal humor carries rich cultural connotation and reflects the wisdom,communicative skills of the humor maker.There are many researches on verbal humor both at home and abroad,especially in the fields of sitcoms and literature from the perspective of pragmatics and cognitive linguistics.However,the researches on the humorous corpus of public speech are limited.This paper intendsto use qualitative research methods to explore the mechanism of verbal humor generation under the theoretical framework of cooperative principle and relevance theory.Through the analysis in the paper,it points out that verbal humor can be produced by violating the cooperative principle,the gap between maximum relevance and optimal relevance,and the speaker’s expanding contextual reasoning.The cooperation principle and relevance theory have a good elaboration on humor in public speeches,but both have their own deficiencies in explanatory power.Only the combination of those two theories can better explain the generation mechanism of verbal humor.