Abstract

 As a common linguistic phenomenon in daily communication, irony has drawn a lot of scholars’ attention and a great amount of analyses have been made on irony in a wide variety of fields, such as philosophy, psychology, pragmatics and especially cognitive pragmatics. Relevance Theory has great power in explaining complicated linguistic phenomenon. The Relevance-theoretic approach to irony serves an effective way to study the mechanism and functions of Relevance Theory, and also a new perspective to study irony. Through the application of Relevance Theory on the analysis of irony, we obtain a deeper and clearer understanding on the mechanism and functions of Relevance Theory, and the important role that Relevance Theory plays in irony studying. This thesis is aimed at explaining the application of Relevance Theory in the analysis of the verbal irony and offering readers a basic understanding of the Relevance Theory.

Keywords: irony  cognitive pragmatics  relevance theory

摘要

言语反讽作为一种人类独特且重要的交际方式，在日常交流中几乎无处不在,对其正确的使用和理解有利于我们更好地表达自己的思想和理解他人的话语。长期以来,社会学、修辞学、语言学、文学等诸多领域都对反语从不同的层面进行过研究。近年来，随着认知理论的广泛应用，学界逐渐发现对反讽这一语言现象本身的分析和理解并不能很好地解释反语的理解机制。本文认为从认知的角度分析反讽话语可为这个问题找到更合理的解释。通过分析可以发现关联理论是研究反讽机制和功能的有效途径，同时它也是从一个新的角度对反讽话语进行研究。本文的意义在于，首先，分析反讽的实际应用有助于我们更好地理解反讽话语的内部机制及语用功能，进一步加深对反讽话语的认识，也能对英语学习者在涉及关联理论在语言分析应用的时候有所启发和借鉴。其次，运用关联理论分析反讽话语无论在理论还是在实践中都是一个有意义的实践，这再一次证明了它们的有效性和实用性。第三，通过解释反语的产生和解释的过程，它可以帮助人们用一个更全面的方式理解反讽话语，同时可以清晰地呈现出关联理论在理解反讽这类语言现象的作用。

关键字：言语反讽；认知语用角度；关联理论

Chapter One Introduction　
1.1 The Background of the Study
At first, the irony research originates from the rhetoric domain. Afterwards, large numbers of analyses on irony appeared in the realm of semantics, psychology, pragmatics and particularly to cognitive pragmatics. Some scholars and linguists made a set of theoretical researches on its application, including Grice’s interpretation of conversational implicature, Searle’s insincere speech act theory, and Leech’s politeness theory. Sperber and Wilson unlocked the door into a new degree of irony comprehension, which in return expand our pragmatic knowledge about irony and attracted more followers to carry on the research in this field. Language studies have already been one of the most traditional applications of linguistics. In practical application of such studies, still, very few people explored the irony from the angle of Relevance Theory. This thesis will study the language phenomenon according to Relevance Theory. On the one hand, by interpreting the Sperber and Wilson’s relevance theoretic account of irony and under the guidance of relevance theory, it will confirm the rationality of this point of view and work out how to analyze the generation of such problems, recognition and comprehension of irony; on the other hand, linguistic theories can be greatly helpful to our communication comprehension.