A Speech Act Perspective On Irony In Pride And Prejudice

As a kind of achievement of language, literature has become recapitulatively the speech act created by the author in his process of writing. Readers can generally know the ideological content, theme and the author’s intention. With the development of society and language, pragmatic theories walk into combination with language gradually. Hence, emerges a new subject, literary pragmatics, with its core, speech act theoryattaining broad application. Literature being a form of language can be analyzed from the perspective of speech act theory.Jane Austen is a great novelist in Britain. Most of her novels tend to reveal females’ attitude to marriage in the family of countryside and small town. She depicts vividly the life, love concept, and marital view in that period from the special perspective of female. Irony is the typical characteristic in her novel Pride and Prejudice. However, the previous scholars only concentrate on the rising of independent ideological consciousness, social formation, writing style and arts and translation towards the novel. They seldom study the novel from the perspective of language and speech act. Nevertheless, this thesis analyzes the language and irony in Pride and Prejudice attempting to to explore the application of speech act theory in literary works in a brand-new view point.Based on Austin and Searle’s achievements on speech act, Van Dijk classifies speech acts in literature works as macro speech acts and micro speech acts. This thesis tends to make an analysis on the conversations of the charaters from macro and micro aspect in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. To begin with, the essay states the significance and meaningof this writing, and then gives a brief introduction to literary pragmatics. As western research on irony is inclined to be more mature than that of Chinese, the essay will give a much more detailed summary to the research actuality abroad and relatively less words on research at home. Owing to irony’s important role in literature, scholars not only explore it from speech act theory, but also try to discuss it from the angle of other pragmatic theories, such as relevance theory and irony, conversational implicature theory and irony, and linguistic adaptation theory. Therefore, the essay is about to give a comprehensive review to the relationship between the three ones and irony. In part three, the thesis gives a detailed illustration to speech act and its development. Austin initated the theory and shaped its basic structure. However, it needs further improvement. Then his student Searle supplemented and developed it to a relative mature state. Even so, there is a vast space for the theory to develop. in part four, the essay presents the writing style of Jane Austen, and summarize the story in Pride and Prejudice concisely. from the perspective of macro and micro speech act. from the point of macro, the essay tries to look into the use of literal and structural irony. While, as for micro irony, this paper attempts to analyze conversations in the novel according to Searle’s classification to speech act, that is assertives, directives, commissives and expressives. At last, the thesis makes a brief conclusion to my cognition to the study of the theory and shortcomings during the writing of this article.Through learning the theoy and writing this paper, we may find that pragmatic principles has great practical value in literature critic and analysis, and it can illustrate language phenomenoa much better, helping the readers to understand literary works thoroughly.