A Study Of Irony In Emma From The Perspective Of Speech Act Theory

This thesis attempts to make a detailed analysis of irony in Jane Austen’s Emma from the perspective of speech act theory. It has an overview of previous researches to irony from rhetorical, pragmatic, cognitive, psycholinguistic and literary approaches, elaborating the relations between speech act and irony, and finally has a case study of ironic features in Emma within the framework of speech act theory.With the development of linguistics, pragmatic theories became combined with language gradually. Hence, a kind of neoformative interdisciplinary, literary pragmatics came to draw the attention of many researchers and scholars. It is a useful tool for the discourse analysis. Its effectiveness can be fully testified and verified in text interpretation, in revealing the major theme of a literary work in particular. Among the branches of pragmatics, speech act theory plays a dominant role in literary pragmatics. As one of the key writing skills, irony has intimate relationship with speech act theory. The intimacy is embodied in four aspects:Ⅰ) irony and indirect speech act; Ⅱ) irony and illocutionary force; Ⅲ) irony and perlocutionary effect; Ⅳ) irony and insincerity principle.However, nowadays, especially in China, this kind of theory is not well known to many scholars yet. Thus, the thesis aims at applying this theory in one of the most famous English literary works by Jane Austen. As a famous British female novelist in the late18th century and the early19th century, Jane Austen is generally regarded as a successful ironist. Irony is known as the most outstanding feature in Austen’s novels. Many scholars attempt to have a theoretical study over irony in her novels; the most widely studied one is Pride and Prejudice. It has been discussed from various linguistic perspectives by many scholars at home and abroad. Just like her other works, Emma is also well known for its ironic writing technique. But its irony is seldom analyzed from the perspective of speech act theory. Thus, the present thesis endeavors to employ speech act theory to reobserve Emma, aiming at interpreting ironic feature in Emma. Speech act theory is initially put forward by Austin and developed by Searle. And Van Dijk further classified it into macro and micro speech act. This thesis mainly analyzes Emma from macro ironic speech act and micro ironic speech act:the former one is used for portraying characters and narrating plots of the story, while the latter refers to the interrelations between characters and characters in the novel, and the interactions between the author and the readers as well, it has something to do with conversations in the novel or the drama.The thesis consists of five chapters:Chapter One deals with the objectives and the significance of the study, research methodology and the overall structure of the thesis.And then, Chapter Two gives a literature review to the irony. It contains general introduction to the irony, including definitions and classifications of irony, and previous studies of irony at home and abroad.Chapter Three, also giving a literature review, is different from the previous chapter. This chapter tries to cover a theoretical framework of the study including speech act theory and its relationship with irony from four different respects. This chapter analyzes speech act theory from four main aspects:the first part is Austin’s theory which includes locutionary act, illocutionary act, and perlocutionary act; the second part is Searle’s:on the basis of Austin’s theory, Searle further developed the illocutionary act; and the third part is felicity conditions of speech act theory put forward by Austin and Searle respectively. And the fourth part includes macro speech act and micro speech act.Chapter Four contains the most significant part of the thesis. Firstly, it makes a brief introduction to Emma, its writer, Jane Austen and her art of irony as well. Secondly, it interprets Emma from macro and micro speech acts. From the perspective of macro ironic speech act, the story is depicting a development of a girl from naivete to maturity, and finally leading a happy life by means of dramatic and situational irony as well as ironic description of characters. While from the perspective of micro ironic speech act, this thesis mainly analyzes irony from four aspects:Ⅰ) direct and indirect ironic speech acts, Ⅱ) ironic illocutionary acts which can be further divided into directive irony, assertive irony, expressive irony and commissive irony, Ⅲ) insincere speech act, and Ⅳ) ironic perlocutionary effect which demonstrates the author’s real intention by using irony.At last, the thesis comes to a conclusion and points out limitations and expectations of the related research.By elaborating the irony in Emma, this thesis finds out that in reflecting verbal irony, situational irony and dramatic irony, the speech act theory plays a significant role. Thus, this thesis reaffirms the feasibility of applying pragmatic theories, specifically speech act theory, in literary studies, offering a little reference for future related research.