Irony In Communication: A Pragma-cognitive Study

Verbal irony is a common language phenomenon used in literary works and in our daily life, which has received considerable attention from more and more linguists and psychologists. It is not only a rhetoric device, but also a communication strategy. Sperber and Wilson's "echoic mention theory" within a Relevance-Theory-based framework and Clark and Gerrig's "pretense theory" of irony provide a new way for the research of irony through the combination of pragmatics, cognitivism and psychology. Yet, both theories have deficiencies.This thesis is a tentative study of verbal irony in communication from a pragma-cognitive perspective. The thesis considers irony as a phenomenon of thinking as well as a phenomenon of language. It makes a tentative investigation into the process of irony understanding, particularly irony recognition from the pragma-cognitive perspective. Based on the previous theories of irony, the present study proposes an alternative hypothesis and regards irony as a kind of counter-expectational mismatch.The present thesis consists of five chapters in addition to the Introduction and Conclusion. Chapter One and Chapter Two make up an introduction of irony. Chapter One is a general description of irony. Chapter Two reviews the previous major relevant theories of irony. Chapter Three deals with the general cognitive environments for identifying irony. Chapter Four discusses the cognitive criteria of irony understanding, including the analysis of irony triggering that alerts the hearer to the recognition of ironic interpretation and a discussion of the nature of irony. Chapter Five, in which a panoramic perspective of irony recognition is given, incorporates a discussion of the cognitive principle governing the whole process of irony understanding, the recognition of ironic implicatures and the understanding of ironic impression and attitude.Through the pragma-cognitive study of irony, we find out that irony recognition is a multi-dimensional interactional process. It is a derivational process with mutuality or shared world as the cognitive precondition for irony understanding. And relevance is assumed to be the cognitive principle of irony understanding. The study enriches the previous accounts of irony and helps to depict a clearer image of the process of irony recognition.