A Pragmatic Study Of Oxymoron In Discourse And Its Implications For ELT

Oxymoron is an interesting language phenomenon. It looks contradictory seemingly, but it can express speaker's true meaning. So this interesting phenomenon causes many scholars and specialists research. But these researches often analyze it from the angle of rhetorics, from its construction forms, semantic categories, semantic relationships, comparing with other rhetorics and its translations. Also some scholars try to understand oxymoron from the angle of psychology, socialology, esthetics. We know, learning rhetorics is for use, and using rhetorics concerns about language use. But after searching an amount of materials, the present writer found that few scholars analyze oxymoron from the angle of pragmatics. So the present writer try to analyze oxymoron from the angle of pragmatics, using Grice' s Cooperative Principle, Leech's Politeness Principle and Wilson &Sperber's Relevance Theory. Language is roughly divided into spoken and written language, and spoken language is prominent performance in daily life, and written language is outstanding performance in literary works, so each five examples of daily life and literary works were cited, from the point of pragmatics, especially from the violations of the Cooperation Principle and the violations of Politeness Principle. The present writer explores why people often violate these principles when they use oxymoron in discourse, and which pragmatic effects did these violations reach, after these research, the present writer discovered such an interesting rule: whether in daily conversation, or in literature, there are some violations of Cooperation Principles and Politeness Principle when people use oxymoron, and the violations of Cooperation Principles are outstanding performance in the violations of the maxim of manner, while the violations of Politeness Principle are outstanding performance in the violations of tact maxim, approbation maxim, sympathy maxim and agreement maxim, but all of these violations are very good compliance with the Sperber and Wilson's Relevance Theory. Moreover, in daily conversation, the usage of Oxymoron, more obvious violations are the violations of Cooperation Principle, and in literary works, the more obvious violations are Politeness Principle. Through the above research, we will have a deeper level of understanding and mastering of Oxymoron, thus guide us to use Oxymoron more rationally and reasonablely and make our language more colorful.Finally, as an English teacher, the present writer gets some hints for teaching oxymoron from the angle of pragmatics. For example, first, Oxymoron teaching must cooperate with the teaching skills of listening, speaking, reading and writing, that is to say, while training these language skills, we should explain and drill the relevant rules of use. Second, while teaching language, for example, vocabulary, grammar, we should extract some relevant rhetoric and pragmatic rules as the contents of teaching to interpret and practice language. Third, teachers must combine the functional items with the cultural contents in teaching, in other words, pay attention to the function of culture and language when teaching, try to reveal the rhetorical features. Fourth, comparing the Chinese and foreign language, we should extract some relevant points of cultural features to explain their rhetoric effects. Fifth, we should have different rhetoric contents and methods with different target students at different levels.