A Relevance-theoretic Approach To The Verbal Irony In The Big Bang Theory

As a common linguistic phenomenon in daily communication, irony has drawn a lot of scholars’attention and a great amount of analyses have been made on irony in a wide variety of fields, such as philosophy, psychology, pragmatics and especially cognitive pragmatics. Relevance Theory has great power in explaining complicated linguistic phenomenon. The Relevance-theoretic approach to irony serves an effective way to study the mechanism and functions of Relevance Theory, and also a new perspective to study irony.Under such background, this thesis attempts to do a corpus-based study on the typical verbal ironies in The Big Bang Theory, one of the most popular English sitcoms currently, to study the realization methods of verbal irony and different ways of responding to ironic utterances within the framework of Sperber and Wilson’s Relevance Theory. During analysis, this thesis puts an emphasis on the two important factors-context and mutuality. In addition, due to the fact that the ways of responding to irony reflect the degree of the victims’understanding, some examples are analyzed from the angle of responding.Through analyzing the verbal ironies from The Big Bang Theory, four major findings have been found:(1) the thesis supplies proof for the explanatory power and the feasibility of the relevance-theoretic approach to verbal irony in English sitcoms;(2) the relevance-theoretic approach to verbal irony provides a new perspective on the unique charm of verbal irony and proposes new approach for analyzing verbal irony. From the Relevance-theoretical aspect, irony perceiving is a process of searching for optimal relevance;(3) the principles of relevance play a crucial but invisible role throughout the process of irony realization. The processing of irony is guided by the cognitive characteristic of relevance-searching during communication;(4) the analysis on the different ways of responding to irony provides a new approach for people to understand the perceiving process of irony. To what extent an irony is perceived, and whether the intension of the ironists has been received, both can be reflected from the ways of responding to ironies.Through the application of Relevance Theory on the analysis of irony, we obtain a deeper and clearer understanding on the mechanism and functions of Relevance Theory, and the important role that Relevance Theory plays in irony studying. This thesis is aimed at explaining the application of Relevance Theory in the analysis of the verbal irony and offering readers a basic understanding of the Relevance Theory.