On Speech Act Of Irony From The Perspective Of Implicature

Speech Act theory (SAT), ever since it was put forward by Austin in 1962, has been a major concern of many pragmaticians, some of whom have specialized themselves in certain specific speech acts and have made great contributions to the development of SAT consequently.Generally speaking, irony, as a frequently occurring indirect speech act in daily interpersonal interaction, is the use of words to express something other than and especially the opposite of the literal meaningIn the first place, this thesis discusses the linguistic definitional issues of irony instead of a mere wide-ranging definition, which proves to be more comprehensive and helpful. Then the nature of irony is determined as an indirect speech act as regard to Speech Act Theory. A series of steps are constructed accordingly to draw ironic illocutionary forces from normal conversations, and constitutive conditions of the felicitous performance of a prototypical speech act of irony is analyzed as well.As for the understanding of irony, a number of novel ironic cases via deliberately flouting the four maxims of the Cooperative Principle are explained from the aspect of conversational implicatures, on the basis of an introduction to the concepts of meaning and intention; in addition, an inference schema of irony, modeled on Searle's study is supplied. Next, the author puts the speech act of irony under communicative environment in which people's interactive responses to conversational irony are classified, and furthermore lists the various functions and purposes served by ironical speech acts. Finally, the thesis is concluded by a figure, showing the risky nature of irony, in spite of which stress is still put on irony's merits and flexibility.It is the author's sincere hope that this thesis is of certain help to further research concerning the speech act of irony in the realm of pragmatics.