Proximity: A Cognitive Pragmatic Study Of Chinese Irony

The study of irony boasts a long history. When exploration of irony was in its infancy, irony primarily was regarded merely as a kind of artistic or rhetoric skill such as Socratic irony, dramatic irony, tragic irony, comic irony or situational irony etc. Today the study of irony has become a field of research concerned about diversified approaches and paradigms, often quite different from its original form. The study of Chinese irony or fan yu (a quasi-equivalent of irony in the Chinese language) which is the major concern of the present study. Without other specifications, irony mentioned in the following refers to fan yu or Chinese irony. In Chinese, there exist verbal phenomena which are similar to irony in English, especially in terms of their pragmatic functions. However, Chinese irony or fan yu is different from English irony for usually Chinese irony is not employed as a kind of artistic skill and no distinction is made between dramatic irony, tragic irony, comic irony, and situational irony etc. Besides, Chinese irony or fan yu does not refer to fan feng (a quasi-equivalent of sarcasm) which involves no semantic opposition. Anyway, Chinese irony or fan yu is still a controversial and elusive concept.The present study does not lay emphasis on the comprehensive explication of the characteristics of Chinese irony or fan yu. After reviewing a lot of previous scholars' studies and opinions, the definition of Chinese irony is clarified as: fan yu as it occurs in a given context is a trope by means of which an expression is used in the way that varying degrees of the opposite directional meaning of what is expressed explicitly in the utterance is communicated by the speaker. This point also serves as a feature distinguishing it from other figures. Such semantic anomaly found in the use of irony is not only the product of pragmatic phenomenon, but also the outcome of human cognitive processes. Therefore, the purpose of this dissertation is to study Chinese irony from the cognitive pragmatic perspective and set up a new model to describe the cognitive processes in the use of irony. The cognitive elements and pragmatic factors important in production and interpretation of irony are incorporated into this model to explain its underlying mechanisms, namely Working Mechanism of Chinese Irony Based on Mental Models. What brings together these two opposite directional meanings as of an ironical utterance is the notion of proximity which plays a crucial role in the processes of its interpretation and production. According to the speaker's intentional attitude, examples of Chinese irony can be categorized into two types: positive attitude irony and negative attitude irony with the former conveying the speaker's positive attitude by negative wording and the latter expressing the speaker's negative attitude by positive wording.In the dissertation, proximity is defined by stereotypical relation. Proximity is one of the two dimensions of stereotypical relation. The other dimension is similarity which is not closely related to fan yu and thus is not the concern of the dissertation. Stereotypical relations link the minimal sets of knowledge in man's mind to form the type hierarchical structure of mental models. From those concepts adapted by us such as mental models, stereotypical relation and so on, we develop a new probabilistic MM-based Pragmatic Reasoning Model which is an integrated theory composed of two components, "autonomy-dependence alignment" and "explicit expression-implicit expression inference" with the former devoted to the production of irony and the latter to the interpretation of irony. This model will be applied to analyses of production and interpretation of Chinese irony to form Working Mechanism of Chinese Irony Based on Mental Models.Being the outcome of mapping between two opposite directional cognitive sub-domains, irony can be viewed as a special instance of metonymy. Opposite directional transference of meaning involved in the use of irony results from psychological association which is embodied as stereotypical relations (proximity). Specifically, proximity as the means of semantic association in irony has its own neural network basis for information connection. In the case of irony, if the hearer finds the mismatching between literal meaning and the original mental models constructed according to its context, he will search for the possible alternatives and make comparisons till the one which is most compatible with the context is decided. In the process, the hearer is guided by proximity principle and constrained by context to construct a continuum composed of proximate values standing for varying degrees ranging from the positive extreme point to the negative extreme point. The processing of irony lies in choosing the value on this continuum which is most compatible with the given context. On the other hand, the speaker is constrained by the ironical intentional attitude to construct such a continuum under the guidance of proximity to encode his intentional content into an ironical utterance which is most appropriate to the given context. The use of irony as explained above is driven by agent's cognitive abilities and constrained by context. Cognitive factors and contextual factors motivate and constrain each other to exert influence on the cognition of Chinese irony. The use of irony as a kind of cognitive ability is functioning in the context.The dissertation consists of seven chapters. Chapter 1 is the introduction of the whole dissertation which explains the basic features and properties of irony in conjunction with the rationale, the purpose, data collection, research methods, and the scope of the present study etc. to clarify necessity and feasibility of such a research. Chapter 2 gives a literature review of the previous studies of irony home and abroad to sketch the historical and academic background to the present study. Chapter 3 proposes a set of postulates and constructs the theoretical framework of MM (mental models)-based Pragmatic Reasoning Model. Chapter 4 presents the working definition of Chinese irony of the present study and gives a new taxonomy of Chinese irony on the ground of a revisit to the classifications and definitions made previously. Chapter 5 begins a more detailed description of Chinese irony as a cognitive pragmatic phenomenon. In chapter 6, the MM-based Pragmatic Reasoning Model is applied to the analyses of production and interpretation of Chinese irony to form Working Mechanism of Chinese Irony Based on Mental Models. Chapter 7 concludes the dissertation to explicate findings, strengths and weaknesses, and suggestions for further studies etc.