Pragmatic Analysis Of Common English Figures Of Speech

The paper analyzes such common English figures of speech as hyperbole, irony, personification, oxymoron and metaphor from the perspective of pragmatics and explores how these rhetorical devices make human utterance communication more successful and effective. Pragmatics is of great importance to the explanation of many language phenomena. Rhetoric is closely associated with pragmatics. Both of them aim to study human utterance communication and pursue the optimal choice of synonymous words or sentences. Pragmatic use of language is the situational communication behavior between linguistic signs and language users.The problems that will be settled in the thesis are: 1.How do these common English figures of speech produce the rhetorical effects from the pragmatic perspective? 2. How do we comprehend and apply these English figures of speech from the point of view of pragmatics to effect successful language communication?The effects which are expected to achieve in the thesis are: through the analysis of the English figures of speech listed above, the production of rhetorical effects is basically made clear, and the comprehension of rhetoric turns out to be easier and their application more appropriate.In the thesis, some pragmatic principles and approaches are adopted to analyze English figures of speech. The representative ones are the Cooperative Principle presented by Grice; the Politeness Principle put forward by Leech; the Face-Saving Theory presented by Brown& Levinson; the Relevance Theory involving cognitive pragmatics raised by Sperber D.&D.Wilson; the Pragmatic Inferential Model based on Relevance Theory is raised in the thesis. The area that the pragmatic study of rhetorical devices involves is extremely wide. If we comprehend it from a broad sense, we need to see pragmatics as an approach to language study that combines context and process of language use. With the study of pragmatics deepened, more new pragmatic theories and approaches are expected to support future study of rhetoric.