Forms And Functions Of Verbal Irony In Mandarin Chinese And American English: A Pragmatic Case Study Based On Data From TV Debates

This dissertation is intended to examine the similarities and differences of the use of verbal irony between two divergent languages: Mandarin Chinese and American English. The study is devoted to two aspects of irony: the pragma-linguistic forms and pragmatic strategies in irony realization (or the pragma-linguistic cues for irony), and the pragmatic functions of irony.To conduct such a contrastive study, we must solve two crucial problems beforehand. One is how to identify an utterance as ironical; the other is how to set up a workable framework for the contrastive study on the complicated pragmatic phenomenon of irony.In the attempt to work out the rationale for the identification of irony, a review of previous studies on the nature of irony is provided first. Then in view of these previous accounts, an integrated view on the nature of irony is formed: irony is a prototype-based category in that there is no clear-cut line between ironic and non-ironic utterances; it is generally employed by the speaker to make a critical comment on something or a person; it is recognizable because the hearer detects a certain incompatibility embedded in the utterance with the help of available contextual sources; and the use of irony must achieve at least a particular pragmatic effect. Given this integrated view on the nature of irony, a rationale for the identification of irony is proposed. It is held that the recognition of multi-dimensional incompatibilities is an essential factor in the identification of irony, and the determination of whether an utterance is ironical or not should be based on the assessment of similarities between the utterance concerned and the prototype irony instead of identifying the co-existence of all the distinctive features of irony. The degree of ironicalness is calculated by a formula involving six values: the degree of Allusion of an utterance to the speaker's expectation, the degree of pragmatic Insincerity, the degree of indirect Expression of negative or positive attitude, the degree of context-independent Desirability, the degree of Manifestness of the speaker's expectation, and the degree of pragmatic Force.