《傲慢与偏见》中言语反讽的关联理论研究

1、学校代码: 10036 课程论文开题报告傲慢与偏见中言语反讽的关联理论研究培养单位: 英语学院课程名称: 语言学研究方向: 经贸翻译作 者: 赵明玉日 期: 二一三年 九月十日1 Introduction Verbal irony is a interesting and significant phenomena in conversational interactions, Many scholars has engaged in researching it so as to make clear its cognitive-pragmatic mechanism. And the th

2、esis, based on the achievements made within the relevance-theoretic framework, applies the method of quantitative as well as qualitative analysis and studies the specific verbal irony cases in Pride and Prejudice. It takes verbal irony as a case and presents a comprehensive account of the generative

3、 and operative mechanisms underlying its use as well as the communicative effects it may produce or is intended to achieve in order to fully reveal its richness of meaning, diversity of function and complexity of use, especially in setting up a new viewpoint to comprehend the literary texts.1.1 Need

4、 for the StudyIt has been thousands of years for studying irony, which can be traced back to the ancient Greeks. After Plato, many scholars from various studying fields analyzed and explained this kind of language phenomenonirony. The study of irony first originated in the field of rhetoric. Later,

5、many analyses on irony appeared in the fields of semantics, psychology, pragmatics and especially cognitive pragmatics. With the development of pragmatics, many a scholar preceded deep and theoretical studies on its application, among which Grices interpretation of conversational implicature, Searle

6、s insincere speech act theory, and Leechs politeness theory were of great significance. In 1981, Sperber and Wilson opened the door into a new world of irony comprehension. They proposed treating irony as a kind of implicit echoic dissociative use within the framework of Relevance Theory, developing

7、 the study of ironic utterances into a cognitive field.According to Sperber and Wilson, one of the questions that should be kept in mind in assessing a new approach to human communication is whether it is relevant to more than one of the many disciplines involved in the study of human communication,

8、 such as linguistics, pragmatics, literary studies, and whether it could foster fruitful interactions among them. Since literature is deemed as verbal "irony art" (Halliday, 1983: viii), literary texts provide the scholar of language with a testing ground for the most advanced theoretical

9、models, a basis for the application of linguistic theories, to be verified, further improved and perfected. By placing the argument on the basis of the relevance-theoretic framework of verbal irony, and applying the framework to the study of ironic utterances in literary discourses, the thesis attem

10、pts to show the feasibility of applying the relevance-theoretic approach to the study of verbal irony. Verbal irony may thus be treated as a test case: success or failure in this domain should have implications for our view of utterance interpretation as a whole and make further contributions to the

11、 wider range of application of relevance theory.In addition, no account of communication in general will be complete without an account of literature and its contextualization, and no account of literature will be complete without an account of its use of communication resource generally available.

12、Although literary texts are characterized by the multiplicity of communication sources (characters, authors, readers, etc. ), they do not fundamentally distinguish from any other type of communication in terms of the interpersonal interaction. The writing and reading of literary texts can be seen as

13、 interactive communicative processes. Given the integration of the literary work into a relevance-theoretic framework of verbal irony, the study will benefit the linguistic analysis of literature precisely because of the relevance-theoretic concepts of interpretive and echoic use. These terms allow

14、us to examine the significance of authorial distance within an overall account of communicative processes, thus relieving at least this respect of literature of its special status and relating it to other forms of indirect communication such as verbal irony. Furthermore, the relevance-theoretic appr

15、oach to context proposes rules for choosing the most approach to context for propositions. Therefore, it touches on crucial questions for literary theory. By applying the improved relevance-theoretic framework of verbal irony to the study of ironic utterances in literary texts, the thesis will make

16、methodological proposals for analyzing verbal irony in literary text, context and area that connects the two, these proposal will contribute to general pragmatic theory of literature.1.2 Structure of Thesis The thesis consists of seven chapters. The present chapter is intended as a general introduct

17、ion to the whole research.Chapter 2 is a literature review. It has a survey of, and a re-speculation about the semantic, pragmatic and psycholinguistic study of verbal irony, and points out the weaknesses of these theories. Then it adduces that the problems, which cannot be coped with in these theor

18、ies, can be resolved within the relevance-theoretic framework.Chapters 3, 4, 5 and 6 form the main body of the present investigation. Chapter 3 lays down the theoretical framework of the present study. This chapter, first, will summarize the central claims of relevance theory. Then, a relevance-theo

19、retic account of ironic utterances will be tentatively spelt out and studied. It is argued that a relevance-theoretic account, which treats verbal irony as an echoic interpretation of the attributed thought, utterance or assumption, conveying the speaker's attitude of dissociation, is more promi

20、sing. It is also argued that a relevance-theoretic view of the role of contextual assumptions in utterance interpretation, which treats situationally organized information as merely a subset of the whole information available to the hearer, offers more insight in to a wider range of ironic cases. Ch

21、apters 4, 5 and 6 are devoted to the application of the improved model of irony comprehension to analyzing verbal irony in Pride and Prejudice. This analysis the one hand, shows the effectiveness of this theoretical framework in discourse analysis; on the other hand, provides a new perspective on th

22、e unique charm of Austens art of verbal irony, and therefore makes a significant attempt to combine cognitive pragmatics with literary criticism.Finally, Chapter 7 summarizes the major findings from this research and points its limitations. It also includes suggestions for further study.2 Outline2.1

23、 Basic concepts and theories2.1.1 Verbal Irony  Verbal irony is a statement in which the meaning that a speaker employs is sharply different from the meaning that is ostensibly expressed. The ironic statement usually involves the explicit expression of one attitude or evaluation, but with

24、indications in the overall speech-situation that the speaker intends a very different, and often opposite, attitude or evaluation.2.1.2 Relevance TheoryThe main advantage of Griceans account for pragmatics is that it provides a non-semantic or pragmatic account for the traditional theories of meanin

25、g. However, it remains unclear how his study could be developed into a complete and psychological pragmatic theory. But in Relevance: Communication and Cognition (1995/2001), Sperber and Wilson shift the center of pragmatic theory by locating it firmly in an attempt of cognition, or Relevance Theory

26、. The general aim of Relevance Theory is “to identify underlying mechanisms, rooted in human psychology, which explain how humans communicate with one another ( Sperber and Wilson, 2001: 32 ).2.1.3 Contextual InformationAccording to Relevance Theory, context is not fixed independently in the compreh

27、ending process; it is produced or constructed during the interpretation process, which differs it from that in the traditional view ( which holds that the context is given prior to the act of communication). When interpreting an utterance, the hearer selects, or indeed actively constructs, a context

28、 which seems likely to create the greatest number of contextual effects at the least cost.2.1.4 Verbal Irony within the Framework of Relevance TheorySperber and Wilsons article “Irony and the use-mention distinction” (1981) is an epoch-making paper in the long history of the researching verbal irony

29、, which is mostly different from the traditional view on verbal irony, because it brings about a significant change in the ways of studying verbal irony from the perspective of the communicative approach. Combined with the later development, their theory of verbal irony is thus called the echoic-int

30、erpretation theory of irony, which will be presented in this part. And verbal irony is perceived as implicit interpretive echoic use with a dissociative attitude.2.2 Literature review This chapter attempts to review the approaches to venal irony that are predominant within linguistics, moving from s

31、emantic to pragmatic to psycholinguistic studies, with different focuses on various facets of verbal irony. While some insights have been attained, strands of misunderstanding or misinterpretation still remain. Finally, this chapter comments on those previous efforts in the direction of a unified an

32、d systematic account which the present study sets out to offer.2.2.1 Semantic study of verbal ironyMost semantic approaches to ironic communication associate the phenomenon with simple communicative formula such as saying the opposite of what one means, or as saying something other than what one mea

33、ns. Therefore, irony is treated as indirect speech. As Quintilian observed, there is a difference between what the ironist says and what he means. And he defines verbal irony as the fact that something is the opposite of what is actually said. Many analysts have fallen for this idea, to a greater or

34、 lesser extent, among them Cutler (1974), Searle (1979), Myers Roy (1977) and Haverkate (1990). Semantic treatment of irony generally lies in four linguistic devices: lexical, stylistic, syntactic and prosodic devices. Yet some ironies may pick up one device; others may prefer two or more devices.Ho

35、wever, there are a number of ironical utterances such as ironical questions, understatements, quotations, which can hardly be analyzed simply in the semantics. Many examples can prove that the traditional semantic view of verbal irony is neither sufficient nor satisfactory to interpret all the ironi

36、c utterances, due to the fact that verbal irony is a pragmatic category which does not have conventions and depends on the contextual information of the speakers utterance. On the contrary, the pragmatic research has shed new light on verbal irony.2.2.2 Pragmatic study of verbal ironyAs demonstrated

37、 above, linguistics have had quick development in recent years, which enables the linguists to analyze the process of verbal irony in interesting ways. However, verbal irony is essentially a pragmatic phenomenon that depends much on contexts. It is the pragmatics and super sentential analyses of the

38、 early 1990s that are helping linguistics to add substantially to the theory of verbal irony by taking formal analysis to higher levels. Some important theories and principles in the field of pragmatics have been applied to the analysis of verbal irony. 2.2.3 Psycholinguistic study of verbal ironySi

39、nce the late 1970s, psycholinguists make great contribution to the study of verbal irony. They devote themselves to testifying, modifying and developing the previous theories from the experimental perspective. Among them, there are two main strains: (a) processingequivalence hypothesis, and (b) grad

40、ed salience hypothesis.2.3 Research questions The objectives of the present study is to present a comprehensive account of the generative and operative mechanisms underlying the use as well as the communicative effects verbal irony may produce or is intended to achieve in order to fully reveal its r

41、ichness of meaning, diversity of function and complexity of use. To this end, the thesis will avail some relevant theories of language use, above all, relevance theory ( Sperber and Wilson, 1986/1995 ) will be utilized. By analyzing to the analysis of ironic utterances in literary texts in general,

42、Jane Austens Pride and Prejudice in particular, this thesis attempts to prove that one of the best ways to achieve the adequate interpretation of ironic utterances is in the light of relevance theory, which provides us with a key to the mechanism of inference and a dynamic cognitive view of context

43、for the understanding of discourse, especially its implicature. The study will focus on one important question about verbal irony: how authors and readers achieve the successful communication together? It is hoped that a better understanding of the conversational phenomenon call be finally obtained

44、from this effort.2.4 Research methodsThe thesis mainly applies the method of combining the linguistic theory and the literary works, which proves the feasibility of using linguistic theory in comprehending the literary works. The thesis, based on the echoic-interpretation theory of irony within the

45、framework of Relevance Theory proposed by Sperber and Wilson, applies the method of quantitative and qualitative analysis and studies the specific verbal irony cases in the novel Pride and Prejudice written by Jane Austen. And it proposes an echoic inferential model together with the contextual acti

46、vation, which helps the verbal irony receiver comprehend verbal irony better. And then the readers understand the whole literary work deeply.2.5 Anticipated conclusionsThroughout the recent researches on verbal irony, most of them are theoretical study, while the research applied into practice is le

47、ss. And the researchers prefer to study the verbal irony phenomenon in daily life, and then there exist some defects for irony research. In order to make up the limitations of the previous studies, this research, based on Relevance Theory, analyzes its application in specific literary text, which pr

48、oves the rationality and feasibility of Relevance Theory in comprehending verbal irony, which is the innovation of this research.The case study of verbal irony in Pride and Prejudice tests the feasibility and strong explanatory power of the echoic-interpretation theory of irony within the framework

49、of Relevance Theory in understanding verbal irony in the literary text, which broadens the scope of application of Relevance Theory. This theory provides a new perspective on the unique charm of Jane Austens art of verbal irony. Besides, the application of the echoic-interpretation theory of irony i

50、nto specific literary text makes the reader understand the language form and contents so that they can achieve the unity of form and content while appreciating the literary works.There is no denying that something unsatisfactory still exists in this thesis, and it is possible to leave much room to b

51、e desired. Firstly, the thesis only studies verbal irony, without involving other kinds of irony. Secondly, the examples extracted from Jane Austens work are not exhaustive. To some extent, some important usages of verbal irony might have been missed. Lastly, the echoic-interpretation theory of iron

52、y is still in the course of development, which needs further perfecting.3 BibliographyAlba Juez, L.1995.Irony and the other off record strategies within politeness theory.Miscelanea 16: 13.23.Anlante, D.1981.The theory of ironic speech acts. Poetics Today 2(2): 7796.Austen, J.1970.Pride and Prejudice. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Babb, H.S.1998.Jane Austens style. In Littlewood, 1.(ed.)Jane Austen: CriticalAssessments.V01.II.Mountfield, East Sussex: Helm Information.334-343.Blakemore, D.1990.Linguistic form and pragmatic interpretation: the explicit and the implicit. In Hic