A Pragmatic Analysis Of Verbal Irony In The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn From The Perspective Of The Echoic-Interpretation Theory Of Irony

The study of verbal irony has always attracted different scholars in different fields. Whereas verbal irony had been traditionally approached in terms of the relationship between what is said and what is meant. More recent researches, of a pragmatic orientation, have considered aspects such as the speaker's attitude, intention or context.After coping with the historical evolution of irony and exploration of irony from different pragmatic perspectives, the thesis applies the method of qualitative analysis and studies the specific verbal irony in the novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn written by Mark Twain on the basis of the echoic-interpretation theory of irony within the framework of relevance theory put forward by Sperber and Wilson. As the essential theory of the cognitive-pragmatics, relevance theory holds that verbal communication is a mutual process from cognition to inference. The aim of communication is to change the cognitive environment of the hearer who intends to comprehend the utterances by means of inference and contextual assumptions. People ought to spare no efforts to deal with the utterances so as to achieve cognitive effects. The relationship between them is relevance. Simultaneously, verbal irony is governed by the principle of relevance as other verbal communications. Sperber and Wilson consider that all ironical utterances are echoic and they can be categorized into three types: direct and immediate echoes; echoes(real or imaginary) of attributed thoughts and opinions; echoes of social norms or standard expectations. In addition, the speaker expresses his own rejecting or disapproving attitude to the utterances echoed.The ironical utterances employed by Mark Twain in his work the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn can well serve as the “neutral” language materials to work over. In this thesis, 39 examples are selected and categorized into three main groups by the different attributed contents being echoed to illustrate Sperber and Wilson's account, with an affirmation of its reliability and feasibility to analyze verbal irony in almost all cases.Through the analysis of the verbal irony cases in this novel, the paper reaches the following conclusions:(1) The relevance-theoretic approach to verbal irony can set up a new perspective on verbal irony study and demonstrate that verbal irony perceiving is a process of searching for optimal relevance;(2) It proves the powerful explanation and the feasibility of the relevance-theoretic approach to verbal irony in English novel;(3) The principle of relevance plays a vital role in the process of realizing irony;(4) The practice of linguistic theories in the analysis of specific literary works can help readers gain a better interpretation of literary works. Nevertheless, I must admit that these results are heavily constrained by the corpus chosen for the present study. Therefore, wider and more substantial studies are required in order to reach more conclusive evidence.