【文章內(nèi)容簡介】 sides of the conversation should all obey a principle called the Cooperative Principle that consists of four maxims and some submaxims。 The Politeness Principle put forward by Leech who believes that the Cooperative Principle only interprets the relationship between literal sense and intended sense of utterance, explains how the inexplicit meaning is produced and prehended, but it does not explain the reason why people deliberately violate the Cooperative Principle to convey their real intention. Leech has found the answer to the question: it39。s out of the consideration of politeness. The Politeness Principle is said to save the Cooperative Principle。 the FaceSaving Theory advanced by Brownamp。 Levinson who hold interlocutors should cooperate to save faces for each other while interacting in conversation. Face means honor, selfesteem, public selfimage. People are governed by two desires: to be unimpeded in actions and to be approved of. The first is dubbed the negative politeness, the other positive politeness. Positive politeness can be realized as suggesting monality, understanding, and joint action. Negative politeness is expressed in showing respect and maintaining social distance. Face is said to be a universal notion, there is no faceless munication. Whether a person loses face or not relies much on others. If one does not want to lose face, he/she should not damage others39。 faces. Therefore in order to save faces for both in munication, the best way is to use polite language. The shortings of the theory are: the content of face differs in different cultures。 Sperber D. amp。D. Wilson raised the Relevance Theory from the perspective of cognitive pragmatics to substitute Grice39。s Cooperative Principle. Sperber D. amp。 D. Wilson hold that language munication activity aims to convey the purpose of the speaker. Language munication activity covers a pair of information: the purpose of information and the purpose of munication. That is to say that the speaker shows not only his intention to pass some information but also the intention itself during conversation. In munication the speakers will always express themselves in explicit words so as to make the audience prehend their purpose while the audience will infer the implied information from the information provided by the speaker. The prehension of utterance meaning is a dynamic process of cognitive inference, during which the two sides of the conversation obey Relevance Theory. The information provided by the speaker should be fully relevant。 The audience will merely concern and process the information that is closely relevant to the speaker39。s words when he tries to prehend the utterance correctly. Previous studies only focus on the utterance meaning of the speaker while the relevance theory shifts the pragmatic emphasis from it to the study of psychological process, during which the audience tries to catch the implied intention of the speaker. Relevance Theory has neither maxims nor principles that the speaker should obey during speaking. It only describes people39。s cognitive process in prehending every utterance, namely, the relevance between utterance itself and context, enabling the audience to make reasonable inference to the speaker39。s intention. Correct cognition is based on searching for relevance. The relevance theory does not believe that the speaker makes the audience prehend the intention by deliberately floating certain maxims. However, the contextsensitiveness of Relative Theory is not concrete sufficiently, namely the standard of context identification is vague and general. Moreover the theory has a trend to simplify pragmatics, ignoring the peculiarity of things. The Pragmatic Inferential Model based on the Relevance Theory is raised in the thesis, which holds that pragmatic studies can basically be embodied in the concept of relevance and the process of human verbal munication is none other than a process of searching for the optimal relevance under a certain concrete context. This process, with cooperation as its presupposition might use unusual relevance out of consideration for politeness and other factors. The proposal of a relevancebased pragmatic inferential model can either be applied as a whole, or can be divided into parts with each part practicing a certain function, that is, each of the pragmatic principles can stand on its own and work to explain linguistic and cultural phenomena.With the rapid development of pragmatic study, the scope and depth of pragmatics are increasingly wider and further, new disciplines across pragmatics and other disciplines such as cognitive pragmatics, crosscultural pragmatics and interlanguage pragmatics occur, the obstacle will be removed. The area that pragmatic study of rhetorical devices involves in is wild. If we prehend it from a broad sense, we need to regard pragmatics as an approach to language study that bines context and process of usage.T39。he significance of the thesis lies in exploiting the inseparable relationship between figures of speech and pragmatics. The thesis intends to study the English rhetorical devices at the pragmatic level paratively thoroughly and systematically by means of bining theories quoted from both home and abroad. The thesis also raises its own points of view: With a synthetic analysis of the three major pragmatic principles, namely, the Cooperative Principle, the Politeness Principle and the Relevance Theory. The Pragmatic Inferential Model based on the Relevance Theory is raised, which holds that pragmatic studies can basically be embodied in the concept of relevance and the process of human verbal munication is none other than a process of searching for the optimal relevance under a certain concrete context. This process, with cooperation as its presupposition might use unusual relevance out of consideration for politeness and other factors. This Inferential Model embodies the bination of the advantages of different pragma