A Gricean and relevance-theoretic approach to irony in J.D. Salinger's "Catcher in the Rye"

By Phillip Grider

Seminar paper from the year 2016 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 1,0, University of Duisburg-Essen, language: English, abstract: Irony and, closely related, sarcasm, are figures of speech or tropes used in day to day communication but also often in literary communication, meaning, for one, within the discourse between characters of a novel, but also from author to reader. Although this figure of speech is so frequently used, it can be difficult to recognize as being what it is, as irony can be subtle in nature and thus hard to detect or very direct and easily decipherable. As the field within linguistics that aims at explaining how what is meant by what is said can be produced and understood adequately, pragmatics, naturally, offers many theories on figures of speech, such as irony. Two of these concepts are the basis of this paper, namely Paul Grice's pragmatic theory and D. Wilson & D. Sperber's relevance theory. First the paper outlines, briefly, the concept behind each of the aforementioned theories, then continues in giving a definition of what irony and sarcasm even are in the first place, to then show what the Gricean and relevance-theoretic approaches to irony and the production as well as comprehension thereof consist of, respectively. These approaches are then applied to three examples of utterances from J.D. Salinger's novel The Catcher in the Rye in an attempt to find an answer to the question whether one of the applied theories offers a more elaborate and widely utilizable concept as to what makes an utterance ironical and understandable as such.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 366877952X
• ISBN13: 9783668779525
• Release Date: October 2018
• Publisher: Grin Verlag
• Length: 24 Pages
• Weight: 0.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.1" x 5.8" x 8.3"