A Study Of Irony In English Sitcom

Irony, as a commonly-used linguistic phenomenon in our everyday communication and life, has drawn plenty of scholars'attention for more than two millennia. The study of irony first originates in the field of rhetoric. Later, a large amount of analyses have been made on irony in a wide variety of fields, such as philosophy, psychology, pragmatics and especially cognitive pragmatics.On the other side, English sitcom has been more and more popular among people all over the world in recent years. Meanwhile it is also a good audio-visual resource for the EFL learners. However, abundant ironies in it have set up a lot of obstacles for non-English native audiences in understanding and appreciating the humor in English sitcom. Since irony produces a lot of humor in English sitcom, it is worthwhile to study irony in English sitcom to help the audience have a better understanding and appreciation of irony and humor in such TV series and meanwhile to help the EFL learners improve their English application competence as well.This being the case, this thesis attempts to do a corpus-based study in the Big Bang Theory, which is one of the most popular English sitcoms, investigate into the inner mechanism of irony within the framework of the two theoretical perspectives—Grice's Cooperative Principle (CP) and Sperber & Wilson's Relevance Theory (RT) and make some tentative explorations in this direction.There are altogether five chapters in this dissertation. Chapter one serves as an introduction of the whole thesis, and thus the background, the significance, the organization, methodology and corpus of the study are presented. Chapter two reviews the general knowledge of the key issues in the thesis: the previous study on English sitcom and the previous study on irony. And chapter three focuses on the theoretical framework—Cooperative Principle and Relevance Theory. Chapter four is the main body of the thesis, aiming to illustrate the interpretation of ironic utterance humor in detail by employing the two important theories Cooperative Principle and Relevance Theory through data analysis. And chapter five is the conclusion part, which summarizes the present study, points out its limitations on irony analyzed from the cognitive-pragmatic perspective and gives some inspiring suggestions for further relevant study.