A Contrastive Analysis Of Irony From A Pragmatic—Cognitive Perspective

Based on a review of rhetorical and pragmatic studies on irony, this paper attempts to provide a comprehensive study of irony and make a contrustive analysis of it between Chinese and English. The paper explores irony from a number of perspectives, i.e., the classification, the working regularity and the comprehension process. Besides, comparison is also made from a cognitive point of view. By observing many examples, we can gradually draw some similarities and differences between irony in English and Chinese.The thesis presents the general idea shared by two languages that irony is a common phenomenon in daily life and reveals an incongruity between reality and expectation. From a cognitive perspective, this special trope in English and Chinese requires similar processes of comprehension based on the shared knowledge of communicators. Irony actually reflects our perceptual and conceptual understanding of experience, even a figurative mode of everyday thought. Irony in English, however, can appear m various forms and involves a much broader field than irony in Chinese. Irony in both languages is a case of deviation from normal semantic phenomena and pragmatic principles and requires the conunumcators to analyze all the contextual factors and understand the figurative meaning from the literal meaning.