A Study Of Language Strategy For Verbal Irony In Jane Austen’s Sense And Sensibility From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

Language is the carrier of literary creation, and it is also the only way for writersto express their creative thoughts. As one of the most influential talented womenwriters in British literature even in the world literature at the turn of late18th centuryto early19th century, Jane Austen’s creation reflects intensively her relevance theorynarrative strategy of verbal irony. Therefore, she has been praised as a writer who isequal to Shakespeare in the literary circle. Moreover, in certain extent, the writer’screation has the important relationship with his experience. She has experienced herown love, but never married all her life. However, she understood the true meaning oflove. Thus, most of her works are about the love between young women and men. Interms of the writing style, she is also called a humorist and satirist because most ofher works contain a hefty dose of comedy and irony. Hence, Austen is also anoutstanding writer who performances the sense of the times with the application oflanguage strategy.Sense and Sensibility is Austen’s first published novel, which mainly describes atortuous and touching love story of Elinor and Marianne from Dashwood family. Thisnovel was named Elinor and Marianne at authoring time. When it was to publish, itwas renamed Sense and Sensibility by Austen, which embodies Austen’s deepthinking about the relationship between language and ideological connotation. Elinoris a girl who is prudent, rational and understated when facing her feelings. She is goodat controlling her emotion. However, Marianne is emotional and rebellious. Shealways falls lost in dreaming of romantic love and she does not know how to controlher feelings. The author follows the love affairs of the two heroines and applies thenarrative strategy of irony to make the characters in the novel distinctive. In addition,the author images the protagonists characterized with complex psychologicalactivities and vivid ironic dialogues. The author does not give evaluation to the figures in this novel but conveys the theme of this novel with the help of the narrativestrategy of irony, which can help the readers have a clear idea of the traits of thecharacters and their language features. This novel intends to educate people to controlfeelings all the time, and reminds people that the distorted emotions should not be putabove sensibility so as not to have any regret. Meanwhile, the author also aims atexhorting people not to pay more attention to one’s economic and social status whenfacing his or her marriage, and whether a person has the virtue and observe the ethicalnorms or not should be the more important standards for measuring his or her quality,all of which has reflected the writer’s superb technique of the application of therelevance theory of irony in this novel.One of the characteristics of this novel is the narrative strategy of verbal irony.As a special and common linguistic phenomenon both in people’s dailycommunication and literary works, verbal irony has attracted wide attention from thescholars at home and abroad. At first, it is viewed as a rhetoric method. But since1980s, irony has received more and more attention from the aspect of cognitivelinguistics and is widely used in the field of literature or poetics. From the linguisticpoint of view, this thesis selects the ironic dialogues in Sense and Sensibility as thecorpus and does research based on the echoic interpretation theory of irony within theframework of the relevance theory from the pragmatic perspective. The discussion ofthe plot and the study on the traits of the figures in this novel can not only clarify itssuccessful linguistic features, but also can further deepen the readers’ understandingof the characters’ subtle emotional changes and figure’s ethical values andethical-orientation with the study of the writing strategy research that Austen appliesin the creation of the novel.Within the framework of the relevance theory, Sperber and Wilson are theoriginators of the concept of “echo” and the echoic interpretation theory. They holdthe idea that all the ironic utterances are echoic. Irony has been divided as three typesincluding direct and immediate echoes, echoes of attributed thoughts and echoes ofnorms or standard of expectation. Meanwhile, they have further pointed out that theidentification of irony mainly depends on three points: firstly, make sure that the utterances are echoic; and secondly, make sure of the source of the echoic utterances;at last, recognize the speaker’s negative or disapproval attitudes to the echoicutterances.This qualitative analysis is applied to demonstrate the significance of verbalirony that Austen applies in Sense and Sensibility.20excellent cases of verbal ironychosen from the novel are classified according to the three types mentioned above,and a detailed analysis of the process of identification and comprehension is made.Base on this framework, this study illustrates the methods of responding to irony ofthe victims to traditional ethics in this novel with5cases of verbal irony selected fromthis novel.This study shows that relevance theory has a strong explanatory power in theanalysis of verbal irony in literary works and provides a new perspective for theinterpretation of literary creation. In addition, it helps readers understand thecharacters’ subtle emotional changes and the psychological characteristics of thepeople at that time. Meanwhile, it can make readers have a better understanding of theconnotation mechanism in this novel—sense and sensibility.The greatest significance of this study lies in making the readers have a clearidea of how verbal irony functions in the literary creation. And it can also broach thesubject and has contributed to improve literature funs’ appreciation ability and boostin the depth the research of relevance theory of verbal irony from the pragmaticperspective.