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The Study of Irony in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice from the Perspective of Relevance Theory

Author: MiaoYaLi
Tutor: BiXiYan
School: Xi'an International Studies University
Course: Foreign Linguistics and Applied Linguistics
Keywords: relevance theory irony relevance cognition
CLC: H315
Type: Master's thesis
Year: 2011
Downloads: 134
Quote: 0
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Abstract


Relevance theory was proposed by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson in the book Relevance: Communication and Cognition, which was published in 1986 and revised in 1995. In relevance theory' dissertation">relevance theory, communication is regarded as an ostensive-inferential process. The speaker makes manifest his or her information; the hearer infers the implied intention of the speaker. The central claim of relevance theory is that relevance exists in every communication. Relevance can help the hearer work out the implied meaning of the speaker from an amount of information.Irony is an interesting phenomenon in linguistics. It has a history of over two thousand years. The history can be dated back to ancient Greece. Two hundred years ago, irony was widely used by poets and writers as a rhetorical device. Around the middle part of the last century, irony began to be studied in the field of linguistics. In this thesis, irony will be analyzed with relevance theory from its cognitive aspect. Irony in the novel Pride and Prejudice serves as the data to be studied. In this novel, irony is predominantly in the dialogues and narrations. The main focus of the study in this thesis is on verbal irony. Firstly, these ironic dialogues and narrations can help readers understand characters better. Secondly, they can demonstrate an approach to analyzing irony from the cognitive aspect of relevance theory.The thesis consists of six chapters. The first chapter is a general introduction of the study. The second chapter is a review of literature of irony including the development of the study of irony and Grice’s cooperative principle and maxims. Chapter three is the theoretical framework introducing the relevance theory and its main points. Chapter four introduces Jane Austen’s works and the characteristics of her language. The fifth chapter is a case study of irony in the dialogues and narrative portions of Pride and Prejudice. The last chapter sums up the main ideas of the thesis together with its limitations.

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CLC: > Language, writing > FOREIGN > English > Writing,rhetoric
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