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

Literature is the achievement of language, and it is made up of speech actscreated by authors. By analyzing speech acts, readers can generally understand theideological content and theme of literary works. With the great development ofpragmatics, many important pragmatic theories have been applied in literaturecriticism, for example, the Speech act theory. Therefore, a new subject, literarypragmatics emerges. It has been widely acknowledged that Speech act theory, the coreof literary pragmatics, is one of the most effective ways of analyzing literary texts.Nowadays, it is commonly applied in plays and poems home and abroad, however, itsapplication in analyzing novel texts is rare.Jane Austen is one of the most distinguished novelists in the whole world. In herrepresentative work Pride and Prejudice, females’ attitude to love and marriage in thefamily of countryside and small towns in that period is revealed with her vivid anddetailed descriptions. Irony is an important feature of her novels. However, previousscholars usually concentrate on her figure-modeling, social form and writing stylesinstead of the writing techniques of Jane Austen from the perspective of Speech acttheory. There is one commonplace between irony and Speech act theory that in boththeories language has illocutionary forces. This thesis studies on the ironic language inPride and Prejudice attempting to analyze the application of macro and micro ironicspeech acts in it.First of all, this thesis introduces achievements of current studies on this topicand the purpose of this study. Then the thesis gives a detailed illustration to Speech acttheory and its development. At last, this thesis summarizes the character dialogs in thenovel from the perspective of macro and micro speech acts. Macro speech acts refer tocommunications between the writer and readers, and macro ironies are divided intoliteral ironies and structural ironies. Micro speech acts are used in communicationsbetween the characters. As for micro ironic speech acts, the thesis mainly illustratesassertive irony, directive irony, expressive irony and commissive irony. Based on the collected data, the thesis combines quantitative and qualitative methods to analyzeand study on the application of irony. The conclusion of this thesis is that differenttypes of ironies are applied according to different situations because of their specificproperties. For example, in macro ironic speech acts, literal irony accounts for morepercentage than structural irony. In micro ironic speech acts, assertive irony is themost frequently used one of all these four types. Otherwise, commissive irony andexpressive irony are not often applied because of their limitations. They are usuallyapplied in some special contexts to achieve some particular effects. This thesis isfounded on detailed data research and case analysis and it aims to help readers to get abetter comprehension of Jane Austen’s writing skills. This thesis draws on thepragmatic theories, especially the Speech act theory to affirm the feasibility ofapplying it in literature criticism. It also plays an important role in understanding thetheme and analyzing the characters of literary works..