A Pragmatic Account Of Irony In Fortress Besieged-An Adaptation Approach

The thesis, from the adaptive perspective, offers a functional pragmatic analysis of irony in Fortress Besieged, hoping to find a systematic and coherent account of irony as a result of linguistic choice so as to help us gain more understanding and appreciation of Fortress Besieged.With the development of pragmatics, many of its core theories have found a successful application in literary critics, thus hastening the appearance of a new interdiscipline—Literary Pragmatics. Irony is a common and important cultural phenomenon in verbal communication, thinking, writing and etc. Ch'ien Chung-shu, the sarcastic author of Fortress Besieged, employs a great varieties of irony to expose human or social faults. And many scholars only focus more on the ideological content or rhetorical style of this novel from the perspective of literary criticism. Since irony is used as a most protruding artistic technique to convey and strengthen the themes and aesthetic effects of the novel, how to interpret it from the pragmatic perspective is of great importance and great need.The Adaptation Theory is proposed by Verschueren who tries to integrate cognitive, social and cultural elements into the study of pragmatics and have furthered the development of pragmatics. The present study adopts the Adaptation Theory to make a preliminary exploration of the functions of irony in Fortress Besieged and the analysis is carried out in the following two parts.First, the previous three chapters intend to cultivate a theoretical mode of irony. After coping briefly with the definition and classification of irony, the historical evolution of irony, the exploration of rhetoric and different pragmatic approaches and their limitations, a theoretical mode of irony under the framework of Adaptation Theory is cultivated, which takes into account the linguistic, social and mental factors comprehensively. From the perspective of the Adaptation Theory, irony is analyzed as...