The Study Of Irony From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

This thesis is a tentative study of irony from the perspective of relevance theory, with the view to attesting to the rationality of employing relevance theory in revealing the nature of irony and the explanatory power of relevance theory to the interpretation of irony.To start with, the thesis casts a reviewing glance at the vast literature of irony study, which, roughly speaking, may be boiled down into two categories: the first is the traditional accounts of irony, insisting that irony expresses the opposite of what is literally said, with Grice as the representative of this group; the second category covers most of the recent studies, the opinions of which towards irony are radically different from those of the traditional accounts. The influential ones include Sperber and Wilson's mention theory, Clark and Gerrig's pretense theory, etc., among which Sperber and Wilson's theory is one of the earliest that deals with irony from a cognitive perspective and attracts most attention from researchers of irony. In its later development, the mention theory was covered within the framework of relevance theory and underwent some revision, which shed some fresh light on the study of irony.After the literature review, the thesis gives an introduction to relevance theory in terms of three aspects: (1) the formation and development of relevance theory; (2) the main points of relevance theory; and (3) the application of relevance theory. Relevance theory was developed on the revision of Grice's Cooperative Principle, and provides some theoretical basis for human verbal communication. Concerning the study of human communication, relevance theory rejects the traditional code model and proposes an ostensive-inferential model instead, according to which, communication is a process during which the communicator is involved in ostension and the audience is involved in inference. All the verbal communication iscarried out under the guidance of the principle of relevance, which consists of two parts: the cognitive principle (Human cognition tends to be geared to the maximization of relevance) and the communicative principle (Every act of ostensive communication communicates a presumption of its own optimal relevance). This principle also guides the recognition and interpretation of ironical utterances in verbal communication.To give prominence to the relevance theory's perspective of irony, it is necessary to make a comparison between its explanatory power and that of the traditional approaches. So several lines of this thesis will be dedicated to the traditional accounts of irony, represented by Grice's point of view on irony. By pointing out the deficiencies of Grice's account in explaining the nature and other aspects of irony, the author will point out that the relevance-theoretic approach to irony can in a way make up for the deficiencies and offer more satisfactory explanation to the nature of irony and its interpreting mechanism, which partly contributes to the significance of the study carried out in the thesis.A large space of the thesis is devoted to the discussion of the relevance theory's point of view on irony from three aspects: (1) the nature of irony from the perspective of relevance theory; (2) the recognition of irony from the perspective of relevance theory; and (3) the interpretation of irony from the perspective of relevance theory. With regard to the nature of irony, irony is perceived as an echoic interpretive use of language in which the communicator dissociates herself from the opinion echoed with accompanying ridicule or scorn. The recognition of irony depends on a recognition of the utterance as echoic, on an identification of the source of the opinion echoed and on a recognition of that the speaker's attitude to the opinion echoed is one of rejection or dissociation. To understand an ironical utterance properly, on the other hand, one is supposed to rely on an interaction between the linguistic form of the utterance, the shared cognitive environment of the communicator and the audi...