An Analysis Of Verbal Irony In Hamlet-From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

With the development of pragmatics, verbal irony has been increasingly paid attention to. Many a scholar has engaged in studying this common linguistic phenomenon in communication in order to make clear its derivation, rationale and pragmatic effect.This paper makes a tentative application of the relevance-theoretical account of irony proposed by Sperber and Wilson in the interpretation of ironic utterances in Shakespeare's Hamlet in order to prove the feasibility of understanding non-researcher coined language materials with their attempt.Sperber and Wilson state that the assessment of relevance is a matter of balancing contextual effects against processing effort. Other things being equal, an assumption with greater contextual effects is more relevant; and other things being equal, an assumption requiring a smaller processing effort is more relevant. And every act of ostensive communication communicates a presumption of its own optimal relevance. Relevance Theory does not consider verbal irony a semantic reversal or a violation of some maxim as the classical rhetoric or traditional pragmatics does but states that it occurs randomly, whenever the speaker expresses his rejecting or disapproving attitude to some echoed content such as attributed utterances or thoughts, norms and universal desires. What's more, this echoic attempt with the framework of Relevance Theory successfully provides a rationale for irony in which the blatant violation of a pragmatic maxim or principle of literal truthfulness play no explanatory role: ironic utterances can achieve more complex contextual effect than direct and flat words do to offset the extra processing effort.The ironic utterances employed by Shakespeare in his tragedy Hamlet can well serve as the "neutral" language materials to work over. In this paper, 23 of them are selected and classified into three main groups by the different attributed contents being echoed to illustrate Sperber and Wilson's account, with an affirmation of its reliability and plausibility to interpret verbal irony in almost all cases.Nevertheless, complex cases as with parody, metaphor or pun combined are not included in this paper due to the language material limitation, which leaves much room to be desired. What's more, the comparison of irony theories is made only between Sperber and Wilson's and those of Grice and his followers, which would more or less influence the persuasion of the findings. It is advisable to integrate more attempts to gain a deeper and more complete understanding of ironic utterances.