A Pragmatic Study of Irony in Samuel Beckett’s Plays.docVIP

A Pragmatic Study of Irony in Samuel Beckett’s Plays A Pragmatic Study of Irony in Samuel Beckett’s Plays （School of Foreign Languages, Nanchang Hangkong University, Nanchang, Jiangxi, China） Abstract: Irony is one of the salient characteristics in Samuel Becketts plays.The paper attempts to apply post-Gricean theories of pragmatics to analyze both “echoic mention” and “allusional pretense” ironies in order to reveal the different subjects implied in Beckett’s plays. Through analysis the paper finds that Beckett always used the ironic techniques to build his own unique narrative mode: making oneself alienate himself/herself from the past memories which are painful and fragmented. Key words: Samuel Beckett, dramatic utterances, irony, echoic mention,allusional pretense. I. Introduction Pragmatic study of irony can be dated back to 1970s?Grice. Grice regards irony as a violation of “maxim of quality” in the dialogue that it connotates antonymy which the ironic dialogue expresses. For instance, the addressor invariably depicts an obviously “bad” thing as a “good” one. But, the addressor not only expresses the reverse meaning of irony under certain circumstances. Therefore, Grice?s method turns to be insufficient of explaining uncertainty of irony. Developing Grice?s theory, Sperber and Wilson put forward a newly ironic theory “echoic mention”. It is said that irony does not describe what the addressor?s thinking but the others?. The addressor makes use of the dialogue to express an attitude that reflects thinking in the dialogue, or an attitude aiming at the person who has expressed a dialogue and upholded thinking.Irony belongs to the second level of interpretation of one?s thinking, which is defined as echoic explanation. During the explanation, the addressor eviates himself from echoic thinking. The attitude expressed by irony is usually refusal or disagreement[1]. However, the word “echo” is ambiguous and used to arousing misunderstanding.That i