2.2　Irony and SAT

Irony is a figure of speech，and usually relates one thing but means the opposite.The world“irony”did not appear in English until 1502 and did not come into general literary use until the early eighteenth century.Linguistics has seen quick development in recent years，which enables the linguists analyze the process ofirony in interesting ways.Syntactic，lexical，cognitive and semantic analyses of irony all have shed great light on the study of irony.However，irony is essentially a pragmatic phenomenon that depends much on contexts，and one cannot understand any irony fully without a pragmatic analysis of it.Fortunately some important theories and principles in the field of pragmatics have been applied to the analysis of irony，for example，the cooperative principle，relevance theory and the speech act theory.Followers of the speech act approach hold that speech act is a sufficient approach to the analysis of irony.J.R.Searle，for example，believes that“it is important to see that irony，like metaphor，does not require any conventions，extra-linguistic or otherwise.The principles of conversation and the general rules for performing speech acts are sufficient to provide the basic principles or irony”（Searle，1979a，p.113）.