【正文】 but why do you call it sad? This is an instance of pun. In this example, the hinge is the word tale/tale. What the mouse intends to convey is a tale, whereas Alice mistakes it for a tail. Generally speaking, we can say a miserable story, but we can not say a miserable tail. So Alice gets confused. There is no doubt that this example has a double context. Both the mouse and Alice have their contexts. The following are some of the memorable puns. (4) A professor tapped on his desk and shouted:” GentlemenOrder! 10 The entire class yelled:” Beer! (5) King: ...My cousin Hamlet and my son... how is that the clouds still hang on you? Hamlet: not so, my lord, I am too much in the sun. (6) A man sits down at a table in a restaurant and asks,” Do you serve spirits here? The waiter says,” Sure, sit down, we serve anybody. The list goes on. Puns shine with the luster of wisdom, adding color to advertisements. Readers will easily be captured by the charm of the language and the artistic effects conveyed by them. So the advertiser seldom takes the risk of abandoning them when creating the advertisement copy. Puns and Relevance Theory Sperber and Wilson define relevance as a bined function of effect and effects: Extent Condition 1: an assumption is relevant in a context to the extent that its contextual effects in this context are large. Extent Condition 2: an assumption is relevant in a context to the extent that the effort required to process it in this context is small. Relevance increases to the extent that the information convey by the municator has an impact on the cognitive environment of the hearer—that is, it causes the latter to modify the view of, or thought about, 11 aspects of the world by adopting, rejecting, strengthening or weakening certain assumption. For relevance to be obtained, a stimulus processed in a cognitive environment should have a contextual effect. Consequently, relevance is always a function of a kind of costeffect balance. [3] Relevance is a matter of degree. That is, the greater the contextual effects of a newly presented item of information is, the more relevant it is. It follows that the processing effort needed to derive contextual effects is crucial and this leads to the notion of Optimal Relevance. If processing efforts were not taken into account, human beings would continue to process a newly received stimulus endlessly, bining it with an infinite stock of information, in an attempt to see if it might improve their representation of the world. Thus it is Optimal Relevance that is sought, and not maximal relevance. As Sperber and Wilson put it, all that the audience is entitled to expect is adequate effects for no unjustifiable effort. The most recent formulation of Optimal Relevance is as follows: As utterance, on a given interpretation, is optimally relevant if and only if: (a) The ostensive stimulus is relevant enough for it to be worth the addressee’s effort to process it. (b) The ostensive stimulus is the most relevance one patible with the municator’s abilities and preferences. [4] From this definition, it followed that the hearer is entitled to look for at least adequate cognitive effects in return for no gratuitous processing effort. By 12 adequate effects, they mean more effects than could have been obtained by processing information available elsewhere in the audience’s cognitive environment. From the Relevance Theory point of view, a pun functions as follows: two or more interpretations are intentionally triggered by the municator of a pun, but the addressee rejects the most accessible interpretations to search for a more acceptable interpretation. Although the municator usually intends one single interpretation to be recovered, occasionally, more than one interpretation has to be bined to reach the ultimate message. It manifests to both municator and addressee that the municator intends the addressee to notice more than one interpretation. In most cases, only one interpretation is intended to be retained, and it is made mutually manifest that other interpretations are to be rejected in favor of the one intended by the municator. If two meanings are intended to be recovered, they reinforce one another in some way. Thus the essence of the pun lies in the access to multiple interpretations. In other words, in order to make a pun successful, it is necessary that the addressee should access more than one interpretation of a given utterance. Ultimately, the municator municates a single message, even if he intends to activate two or more interpretations. In regard to the detailed explanations, Part Three will concentrate on the deep analysis of puns from the perspective of Relevance Theory, by taking English advertisements as examples. 13 3. Case Study: Analysis of Puns in English Advertisements In this part, the research methodology will be introduced and the process of research will also be referred to. We will proceed from the data collection and the classification of puns. Date Collection In order to analyze puns in advertisements, the author adopts some qualitative and quantitative methods to prove the theory. She collects some materials for the present investigation. The materials are collected mainly from books and articles on advertising munication written by foreign and Chinese authors as well as from newspapers and magazines. Moreover, the data are all English. Normally, the advertiser would pay attention to the headlines and slogans which serve the function of attracting the attention and gaining favor of the audience, so what under discussion are mainly headlines and slogans of the advertisements. The illustrations or the pictures will not be involved in principle, but sometimes a little explanation will be necessary for the purpos