A Study Of Mock Politeness In Pride And Prejudice From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

This thesis sets out to study the realization patterns of mock politeness in people's verbal communication by analyzing one of world classics Pride and Prejudice on the basis of echoic-interpretation theory of irony from the perspective of relevance theory, and observes that blame by praise, blame by exaggeration and blame by idioms can also achieve mock politeness. In general, mock politeness is a polite verbal behavior that remains on the surface, but in fact it is impolite. That is to say, mock politeness follows some of the maxims of the Politeness Principle, but it may threaten others' face by violating some other maxims simultaneously, which is the same as verbal irony.Relevance theory mainly studies various pragmatic phenomena from human's cognition. It holds the viewpoint that people's all kinds of speech acts should be relevant, which provides new aspects to interpret metaphor, irony, etc. Within the framework of relevance theory, echoic-interpretation theory of irony points out that ironic utterances are cases of echoic interpretation and all the verbal irony should be necessarily echoic. As an echoic utterance, verbal irony can echo others' sayings directly and immediately, the attributed thoughts, or the norms and standard expectation (Sperber & Wilson,1995). Since mock politeness shares no difference to verbal irony generally, then it is reasonable to study mock politeness from the perspective of relevance theory and echoic-interpretation theory of irony. In addition, the studies of mock politeness by Li Chengtuan and Ran Yongping (2014) argue that there are three kinds of realization patterns of mock politeness, i.e. iron fist in a velvet glove, token empathy and allusion. Hence based on all these studies, this thesis finds that the three kinds of realization patterns of mock politeness proposed by Li & Ran cannot conclude all the cases of mock politeness. So this thesis attempts to modify the realization patterns of mock politeness by analyzing the utterances of mock politeness in Pride and Prejudice through qualitative approach. From the analysis of this thesis, it is found that the ways of blame by praise, blame by exaggeration and blame by idioms can also realize mock politeness besides the former three patterns. Respectively, blame by praise refers that the speaker compliments others insincerely on the purpose of expressing his/ her mocking attitude; blame by exaggeration refers that the speaker satirizes others by using some exaggerated words in order to creating a relaxed conversational atmosphere; blame by idioms refers that the speaker applies some appropriate idioms to express his/ her dissatisfaction.This thesis, based on relevance theory, provides a new angle to elaborate mock politeness. At the same time, the present study makes a complement to the realization patterns of mock politeness based on the previous studies. Moreover, this thesis is a typical example conforming to the trend of analyzing certain literature works from the perspective of linguistics. Last but not least, this thesis also provides some suggestions to the further research according to its limitations.