A Contrastive Analysis Of Irony And Banter In Pride And Prejudice

Language deviation is a linguistic device of purposeful violation of grammatical rules and pragmatic principles in language communication. Many a linguist has shown great interests in deviation study and analyzed it from syntactic, stylistic, textual, or rhetorical perspectives. However, pragmatic approach to linguistic deviation is somewhat neglected. Therefore, a pragmatic approach to linguistic deviation should prove a pursuit of significance. When we focus on the pragmatic functions of linguistic deviation, irony and banter, the pair defined by Leech as "an apparently friendly way of being offensive (mock-politeness)", and "an offensive way of being friendly (mock-impoliteness)" stands out prominent. Since irony and banter are closely related in nature and literally opposite to each other, it will be a good choice to study them in pairs from pragmatic approach as two typical examples of semantic deviation. Therefore, this paper conducts a research into irony and banter from a pragmatic perspective, aiming at finding out their specific pragmatic maxims. In order to verify the explanatory power of the pragmatic maxims, this thesis also conducts a comparative study with the data selected from Pride and Prejudice and its three Chinese versions published by most authoritative presses in China. By generating a contrastive study between the origin and its three Chinese versions, we not only apply the maxims into language context, thus contributing to the ultimate goal of pragmatic analysis, but also prove that the pragmatic maxims can be used as a guide in better understanding and appreciating irony and banter, and in evaluation the relevant translation as well.