Approaching Irony: A Critical Appraisal Of Irony Theories

Figurative language has received considerable attention from philosophers, cognitive psychologists and linguists due to the challenge it poses for theories of language comprehension. Irony, as a category of figurative language, although has not been paid due attention as metaphor has, still has its very stand in the rich and varied world of language, and deserves our study, including the study of its producing mechanism, its nature and properties, its psychological and philosophical significance, etc.. In fact, scholars in a number of fields have made great efforts to study irony, and have put forward numerous theories, bringing about profound influence on irony study.This thesis is an attempt to make a critique of irony theories, including the traditional views of irony, and several linguistic theories of irony especially the pragmatic ones, namely, Gricean irony theory, speech act analysis of irony and echoic-mention theory within a relevance-based framework. After pointing out the deficiencies and merits of these theories, I conclude that the echoic-mention theory uncovers the nature of irony and surpasses other related paradigm on this subject both in theory and in practice.Chapter 1 gives a brief introduction to the irony study and the structure of the thesis.Chapter 2 is a survey of the history and typology of irony.In chapter 3,1 make a critical analysis of traditional irony theories, which can be divided into three main categories: the common knowledge and dictionary definition, the literary irony theory and linguistic irony theory. During the discussion, I have pointed out that these categories of traditional views present a prodigious sameness.Chapter 4 continues with a critical evaluation of the mainstream irony theories in pragmatics, including Grice's theory of irony, and HaVerkate's speech act analysis of irony. The former regards irony as an example of the violation of the maxim of Quality while the latter assumes that irony can be properly described in the framework of speech act and is the intentional expression of insincerity. Actually, Haverkate's theory is still in the model of Gricean maxim violation theory. Therefore, some deficiencies of Gricean and traditional views of irony like the two-stage model, limited explanatory power, unstable literal meaning can also be detected in Haverkate's analytical system.As an alternative to the foregoing theories, Sperber & Wilson's echoic mention theory within a relevance-based framework is examined in chapter 5. It is this theory that uncovers the nature of irony. And three properties of irony, namely the looseness of expression, echoic utteranceand attitudes conveyed, are properly summed up in it. It is these three properties that enable the theory to make up for the deficiencies of othertheories, to solve the problems harassing traditional theorists, and to present itself as more sound and practicable than other theories of irony.Chapter 6 ties together the main points in the thesis and points out that although enjoying many advantages over other theories and occupying a prominent position in irony study, the echoic-mention theory is still in need of improvement.