摘要
   
在日常言语交流和书面文体中，人们经常使用反讽，反讽是言语交际中一种常见的语言现象。然而比之于对隐喻、幽默的研究，人们对反讽的研究却少之又少。反讽可以分为三类：言语反讽, 情景反讽和戏剧反讽。本文将言语反讽作为研究的对象，尝试用斯泊伯和威尔逊(Sperber＆Wilson)的关联理论(Relevance Theory)来分析和解释反讽这一语用现象。关联理论摒弃了传统的交际代码模式，提出了明示一推理模式，认为交际是一个涉及信息意图与交际意图的明示推理过程；关联原则包括关联的认知原则(即：人类认知倾向于同最大关联相吻合)和关联的交际原则(即：每一个明示的交际行为都应设想为它本身具有最佳关联性)。接着通过一系列的例证来揭示反讽其本质，并阐述如何在关联理论框架下辨别和理解反讽。得出较之于传统的反讽研究，关联理论反讽观的合理性以及其对反讽本质和反讽理解机制的强大解释力。

关键词：反讽；关联理论；本质；识别；阐释

Abstract

In our speech and writing, people often use irony. Irony is a kind of linguistic phenomenon commonly seen in our daily communication. However, compared with the studies on metaphor or humor, the study on irony is far from enough. Irony can be generally divided into three types: verbal irony, situational irony, dramatic irony. This thesis takes verbal irony as the focus of research and tries to make a pragmatic study on irony from the perspective of relevance theory, which was put forwarded by Sperber & Wilson. Relevance theory developes a new approach to interpret human communication, the ostensive-inferential model of communication. It also holds that relevance governs every aspect of cognition and communication which is expressed in two relevance principles: cognitive principle of relevance and communicative principle of relevance. This thesis aims to state how to understand irony within the framework of relevance theory and to discover the strong explanatory power of relevance theory to analyze irony.

Key word: irony; relevance theory; nature; recognition; interpretation

1.    Introduction

Irony is a kind of linguistic phenomenon which was frequently used in our daily communication. Each of us may have such kind of experience as making or hearing an ironic utterance in our daily communication. For example, your friend plans to meet you at 3:00 pm, but you arrived at 3:30pm, your friend might complain: “you are so punctual!” In this circumstance the speaker is making an ironic utterance and trying to ridicule the hearer. Indeed, irony is such a ubiquitous phenomenon that it has been widely explored and studied in many research fields, such as rhetoric, literary criticism, semantics, and pragmatics and so on.