A Study On Pragmatic Strategies Of Irony Within Integrated Socio-Cognitive Model

The traditional view on irony in rhetoric is a figure of speech whose surface meaning is opposite to real meaning. Irony has been endowed with new concept with the sprung-up and development of linguistics, and significant accomplishments have been achieved, especially in field of pragmatics. Leech, proposer of Politeness Principle, held that irony is a way to be polite. This view, however, has experienced suspect of increasing number of scholars in recent years. Culpeper, as an opponent, argues that irony in its nature is impolite because it may do more hurt to the victim compared to direct criticism. Based on this view, the paper will study pragmatic strategies of irony in literary discourse within Culpeper's socio-cognitive integrated model from perspective of impoliteness. Purposes of this thesis are to provide a completely new angle for related study and offer evidence for impolite nature of irony.Considering the importance of cognitive appraisal, the thesis reclassifies irony as explicit ironic praise, implicit ironic praise, explicit ironic blame and implicit ironic blame on basis of the generally accepted pragmatic classification of irony-ironic praise and ironic blame, and these four types of irony will also be interpreted in socio-cognitive integrated model separately. It is found that major pragmatic strategies of irony in Pride and Prejudice are affective, interpersonal and aesthetic strategy, and there are corresponding relations between pragmatic strategy and each type of ironic utterance in varying degrees.