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

Speech Act Theory(SAT) is one of the most significant theories in pragmatics, which is initially posed by British philosopher of language John Austin in the 1960 s. Then the theory is developed by Austin's student, Searle. From then on a complete theoretical system has been formed. With the rapid development of SAT, it has become a research focus to many researchers both at home and abroad. The successful application in literary works promotes the formation and development of literary pragmatics.Jane Austen is one of the most outstanding female novelists. The flexible application of irony is an important feature in her representative work Pride and Prejudice. The author holds that irony is a kind of speech acts, it has illocutionary forces as well. Most of the previous researchers pay more attention to Austen's ideological contents in critics of the novel while seldom of them put focus on language itself. Based on SAT, this thesis will take Pride and Prejudice as research subject to discuss the application of SAT in analyzing irony in this novel.This thesis combines qualitative and quantitative analysis methods to classify the corpus statistics in this novel which include literal meaning and dialogues between characters. It mainly analyzes Pride and Prejudice from aspects of macro ironic speech acts and micro ironic speech acts to classify statistics. Macro ironic speech acts mainly contain literal ironies and structural ironies. Micro ironic speech acts are the main body of text analysis which include four aspects: assertive irony, directive irony, expressive irony and commissive irony. From analyzing and comparing the different ironic speech acts, it can be concluded that different kinds of ironies have different application rates. And assertive irony take the highest application rate in this novel.Through the combination of a great quantity of data analysis and case study, this thesis aims to make a comprehensive study of ironic speech acts in this novel, and help readers get a deeper understanding of Jane Austen's art of irony. Besides, it may help readers comprehend the rhetorical means and the author's real intentions when they are reading literary works. It intends to make constructive influences in application of SAT in literary pragmatics.