A Study Of Irony In Pride And Prejudice From The Perspective Of Adaptation Theory

This study is intended to make a comprehensive dynamic analysis of the dominant feature-irony in Jane Austen's famous novel Pride and Prejudice within the framework of Adaptation Theory in pragmatics with the aim to prove the great interpretation power of Adaptation Theory and lead readers to think of and grasp the soul of the novel through "irony" this language shell.The present study is a theory-driven and data-based study. The data is irony selected from Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. In the light of Adaptation Theory, this study provides a comprehensive and dynamic analysis of irony adapting to the communicative correlates including the communicators'mental world, social world and physical world and structural correlates through the different degrees of salience of the communicators.Through the analysis of irony in Pride and Prejudice, we have obtained some important findings. First, the use of irony in Pride and Prejudice is the result of the communicators'making linguistic choices consciously or unconsciously. It is the communicators'dynamic negotiable process of choosing from various linguistic forms as well as strategies to achieve certain communicative purposes in the process of interaction. Second, the choice of irony is made to adapt to the communicative correlates including the communicators'mental, social and physical worlds and structural correlates to meet their special communicative purposes and achieve a particular pragmatic effect. Third, the process of adaptation is a dynamic process rather than a static one through the medium of adaptation salience. The wider gap between expectation and reality, the higher degree of individual salience the irony has; the more obvious the asymmetry between irony and reality is, the higher degree of social salience the irony has.Different from traditional accounts of irony, which focus on the isolated analysis mainly based on the theoretical doctrine, thus causing the insufficiency of study on irony, the present study is aimed at fixing this imperfection by analyzing the specific discourses within the framework of Adaptation Theory. It integrates social, cognitive and physical elements into the analysis of irony in Pride and Prejudice, thus providing a comprehensive pragmatic approach to irony, which deepens the readers' understanding of the literary works. It also proves the validity of application of Adaptation Theory to the study of literary works and further expands the application range of Adaptation Theory.It is hoped that the findings in the thesis can be used in studies of other similar literary works and can help the readers gain a better understanding and appreciation of literary works.