《傲慢与偏见》中言语反讽的关联理论研究.docx

1、傲慢与偏见中言语反讽的关联理论研究学校代码: 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 mech

2、anism. And the thesis, 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

3、of the generative 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 litera

4、ry texts.1.1 Need 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

5、rhetoric. Later, 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 im

6、plicature, Searles 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 T

7、heory, developing 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 hum

8、an communication, 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 theoret

9、ical 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

10、attempts 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 t

11、o the 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 availa

12、ble. 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 se

13、en as 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 a

14、llow 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

15、 approach 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

16、make 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 intr

17、oduction 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

18、theories, 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

19、-theoretic 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 speakers 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 ironyis 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 indications

24、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 meaning. However,

25、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. The genera

26、l 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 comprehending proce

27、ss; 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 which seems

28、 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, which is m

29、ostly 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-interpretation

30、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 semantic to p

31、ragmatic 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 and systematic

32、 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 means. Therefo

33、re, 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 lesser ext