Study On Verbal Irony: A Mental Model Based Pragmatic Reasoning

As a kind of common as well as special language phenomenon, irony has attracted many scholars'attention for a long time. In recent years, studies on irony have already get out from the mere rhetoric speech study and gradually expanded into many other fields such as philosophy, psychology, linguistics, etc., with a lot of achievements, which offers beneficial guidelines for people's better understanding and applying of it. While these studies never present a satisfactory and complete account of the dynamic cognitive mechanism behind the use of irony. This thesis aims to study irony from the cognitive pragmatic perspective and try to set up a new model to describe the cognitive processes in the use of irony.The present study applies the Mental Model-based Pragmatic Reasoning Hypothesis proposed by Xu Shenghuan to the research of the production and comprehension of irony. MM-based Pragmatic Reasoning Model composed of two components,"autonomy-dependence alignment"and"explicit expression-implicit expression inference"with the former explaining the production of irony and the latter explaining the interpretation of irony. Departing from psychological reality, we adopt a qualitative and introspective method to make a detailed analysis of the data so as to reveal the dynamic meaning construction of irony. We find out people's psychological association, which is embodied as stereotypical relations (proximity), plays a crucial role in the opposite directional transference of meaning. The relation of proximity serves as the cognitive medium in irony use. On one hand, motivated by intentionality, the speaker constructs a positive-negative continuum under the guidance of proximity and chooses an ironical utterance which is most appropriate to the given context. On the other hand, the hearer guided by proximity principle and the speaker's intentionality also constructs such a positive-negative continuum and makes downward reasoning to seek a proper value on the continuum in his Mental-Models as the implicit expression which is opposite to or on the opposite direction to speaker's explicit expression. With an integrated comprehension of explicit and implicit expression, the hearer finally comes across the meaning of irony as well as the speaker's ironical attitude.It is fairly known that language communication happens in a specific cognitive environment, driven by interlocutor's cognitive abilities and constrained by context. Nevertheless, because of the exclusion of sociocultural influence from context, traditional nonliteral language comprehension often neglects the impact of social and cultural on language comprehension. After the deep analysis of the underlying mechanism of irony use, this thesis goes further to give a try on the sociocultural influence on irony use, which is recommended to take into consideration in later research to broaden the domain of study. The thesis is expected to make some valuable contributions to a comprehensive study of irony.