| Irony is a universal phenomenon in daily communication. The study of irony hasattracted scholars from different domains for centuries. Predecessors draw differentconclusions to their studies from rhetoric to cognitive pragmatics, which provides thefundamental theory for the later learners. This research regards verbal irony as research object.It reveals the nature of verbal irony with relevance theory proposed by Sperber and Wilsonand shows how human produce and interpret verbal irony. It explains irony from twoperspectives. On one hand, it shows that how the speakers give ostension to the listener. Inaddition, ironic stimulus gives a new method to produce verbal irony. On the other hand, itpresents how the listeners interpret verbal irony with inference. The cognitive environment isan essential factor for interpretation of verbal irony.Relevance theory proposed by Sperber and Wilson is a classical theory about humancommunication and cognition. Relevance theory has a strong explanatory power for verbalirony. The production and interpretation of verbal irony is actually a process of seekingrelevance. This research tries to present one of the most popular American situation comedyFriends as a corpus for qualitative analysis. The research will analyze verbal irony in Friendswith relevance theory.This thesis is made up of five chapters. The first chapter is the overview, including thebackground, the reason, significance and the structure of study. The second chaptersummarizes and integrates the predecessors’ points of view based on a plenty of researchesand documents, it can be divided into three parts. The first part deals with definition andclassification comprehensively; the second part deals with the development of relevancetheory and basic concepts in detail. The third part is the reason why the research adoptsrelevance theory to study verbal irony. In the third chapter, there are two research questions.The research describes the reason of corpus selection and the process of collection. The fourthchapter is the crucial part of the thesis. The research deals with the nature of verbal irony fromtwo aspects: the incongruity of between the expectation that the listener conveyed and thecounter-expectation of the actual utterance and violations of maxims of verbal irony. Itpresents how human produce and interpret verbal irony from the listener’s and the speaker’sperspectives. The final chapter sums up the main findings and the limitations of study. Thisthesis will provide a new direction of the development of verbal irony for future study. |
