Relevance Theory - Pride And Prejudice - Irony,

The thesis aims at testing the rationality and feasibility of the echoic mention theory of irony proposed by Sperber and Wilson as well as its explanatory power to the interpretation of irony by analyzing the examples in Pride and Prejudice to elaborate how to interpret the verbal irony within the framework of the relevance theory .As a theory of pragmatics on explaining human communication, the relevance theory takes a powerful explanation on various language phenomena such as metaphor and irony. The relevance theory holds that verbal communication is a process of mutual manifestness from cognition to inference. The purpose of communication is to change the cognitive environment of the hearer who intends to interpret the speech through inference and contextual assumptions. People should make efforts to deal with the speech in order to achieve cognitive effects. The relationship between them is relevance. Irony is also governed by the principle of relevance as other verbal communications. Irony is a type of echoic mention in which speakers echo or respond a previously stated utterance or belief of others and simultaneously express their negative attitude in achieving ironic effects.By analyzing the examples of verbal irony in Pride and Prejudice from two levels of Macro speech acts and Micro speech acts, the thesis gets at the following conclusions: 1) In possession of reasonable explanation of irony, the relevance theory sets up a new point of departure to approach irony . 2) The practice of linguistic theories in the analysis of specific literary works can help us have a better understanding of literary works. 3) Language study cannot do without literary works; otherwise literary works can not be deeply understood . 4) The analysis of examples in Pride and Prejudice gives more attention to the novel.