서강대학교

목차

The purpose of this study is to explore how the Metapragmatic Principle works in the account of some pragmatic inferences and covert communication. An attempt is made to show that metapragmatic principles are required to deal with some pragmatic phenomena including Generalized Conversational Implicatures (GCI, henceforth), irony, metaphor, and other figurative uses of speech. In doing so, it is argued that a metapragmatic analysis is more adequate than other existing principles.
Although it has been considered a cornerstone of modern pragmatics, the Cooperative Principle (CP, henceforth) proposed by Grice (1967) is not without problems. Grice’s theory of cooperative conversations has limitations, largely because it is based on introspection rather than data, not taking into account interpersonal factors. However, it is undeniably an essential part of the foundations in the discipline of pragmatics, and as such it is part of what pragmatics all build on. Therefore, a great care should be taken in its interpretation. We offer some reasons for limitations of other existing principles and develop a new analysis in terms of the Metapragmatic Principle, which is designed to deal with a higher-order inference.
Unfortunately, however, not many development issues are discussed and little attention has been paid to the Metapragmatic Principle (hereafter, MP) since it was proposed by Lee (2007). Therefore, I will provide examples such as irony, metaphor, and conversational implicature in order to verify the concept and address the necessity of the MP with effectiveness. The present dissertation intends to demonstrate that the MP is superior to other proposals in analyzing irony, metaphor, and conversational implicature.