A Study On Irony In Dialogues Of A Dream Of Red Mansions From The Relevance Theory

As one of the interesting and significant phenomena in conversational interactions, irony has attracted the linguists'great attention. The present thesis makes a case study of the irony in A Dream of Red Mansions under the framework of relevance theory and presents a comprehensive account of the generative and operative mechanisms underlying its use.Irony is defined as an echoic-interpretation according to the relevance theory, in which the communicator dissociates herself from the opinion echoed with accompanying ridicule or scorn. Therefore, for the identification of irony it is essential to find the echoic quality of the utterance and the speaker's attitude of dissociation towards this utterance. As a further development of Sperber and Wilson's hypothesis, Yus's model of irony comprehension assumes that some kind of incompatibility between the information provided by contextual sources and the proposition expressed by the utterance is necessary to foreground the speaker's dissociative attitude, thus helping the hearer to grasp the ironic interpretation of utterances. The identification of irony can be speeded up with the multiple activation of contextual sources.The conversations of ironic utterances employed by Cao Xueqin in his tragedy A Dream of Red Mansions (the English version translated by Yang Xianyi and his wife Gladys Yang, is the version most complete and most faithful to the original) can well serve as the "neutral" language materials to work over. In this thesis,36 of the conversations in the novel are selected and classified into four 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 irony in almost all cases. This thesis aims to analyze irony in the people's daily communication within the Relevance theory, and helps the communicator to avoid the misunderstanding during the interaction.