Irony as a perlocutionary act. A pragmatic analysis of ironic utterances

The aim of my thesis is to collect and then analyse authentic ironic utterances from specific area. The emphasis is put primarily on irony signalizing and irony understanding. The phenomenon of the irony is looked from a pragmatic point of view and analysed with respect to Theory of Politeness and Grice's Cooperative Principle. We made a further remark about signaling ironic utterances, confirmed the hypothesis about irony signalizing and showed the most frequent language signals. We showed the preconditions which are necessary for irony understanding and explained the relation to Theory of Politeness, Cooperative Principle and Brown and Levinson's "face-saving" politeness theory. We showed, that irony is more frequently used in negative situations (as ironic critisism) than in positive ones. But we found out that there are the examples of ironic critisism which are far less face threatening than literally spoken ones. At the end of the thesis we tried to propose own classification based on pragmatic functions of irony