Cognitive Model Of Verbal Irony Based On Relevance Theory

Verbal irony, as a distinctive and important way of human communication, is pervasively used in daily life. A good command and employment of verbal irony not only helps expressing our thoughts but also facilitates processing and understanding ironic utterances. Over the years, researchers from many fields of study such as sociology, rhetoric, linguistics, literature, etc. have analyzed verbal irony from different aspects, which, roughly speaking, boil to two categories:the first is built on the Gricean model or the traditional pragmatic accounts, holding that irony expresses the opposite meaning of what is literally said, with Grice (1975) as the representative of this group. Simulated by Grice’s theory, Searle (1979), Amante (1981), Leech (1983) etc. have examined irony from the pragmatic perspective, arguing that irony is produced by means of violating some principle of communication. The second category mainly focuses on the pragmatic-cognitive approaches, among which Sperber&Wilson’s echoic-interpretation theory (1981), Clark&Gerrig’s pretense theory (1984) are two most influential ones, emphasizing the function of the mutual background knowledge in producing and understanding verbal irony. In recent years, with the wide application of cognitive theory, linguists gradually discover that the study of language itself cannot adequately explain for what purpose irony is produced and how it is generated by the speaker and interpreted by the hearer. The author of the thesis tries to find a more reasonable explanation for these questions from the cognitive perspective.Therefore, enlightened by the achievements and limitations of the previous studies, the thesis selects the ironic discourses as the research materials from the American sitcom The Big Bang Theory. And by means of qualitative analysis, the author attempts to study the cognitive model of verbal irony in terms of its generation, recognition and interpretation. To achieve this goal, the thesis employs Relevance Theory and Echoic-interpretation Theory presented by Sperber&Wilson to establish an analytic framework under which the cognitive model of verbal irony is elaborated.After carefully analyzing of the165groups of ironic discourses in The Big Bang Theory the author concludes that:1) just like other verbal communication, the essence of verbal irony lies in the fact that it is an ostensive-inferential process governed by the principle of relevance;2) desire of expressing opposite opinion, criticism, humor, politeness, etc. may motivate the speaker to use irony;3) Irony production is a cognitive process of echoing and interpreting the speaker’s utterances. It achieves relevance by echoing what has been told, expressing his denial and disapproving attitude and meanwhile creating such contextual effects as sarcasm and humor;4) Irony recognition and interpretation is also a relevance-driven cognitive process in which the hearer, with the help of the irony recognition conditions, obtains sufficient contextual effects, namely sarcasm, humor etc. through the efficient processing effort, and finally successfully infers the speaker’s communicative intention.As to the significance of the study, three aspects are involved:firstly, by discussing the verbal irony collected from the latest American sitcom, the thesis, to some extent, enriches the research material for irony analysis; Secondly, by employing relevance theory to explore the cognitive model of verbal irony, the thesis turns out to be a worthy academic practice in the theory application; Thirdly, by the analysis of a certain number of examples, the thesis, to a certain degree, helps people improve their use and understanding of English verbal irony and promotes the efficiency and quality of verbal communication.