Pragmatic Analysis Of Irony: An Adaptation Approach

This thesis offers a pragmatic analysis of irony utilizing the Adaptaion Theory, which views linguistic phenomenon as a process of choice-making for the purpose of successful communication and survival in the long run. Irony in the present study is defined as a kind of communicative strategy chosen by language users to achieve some communicative goals.Previous studies on irony have made more or less contributions to our present understanding of the full scope of the topic, in spite of their limitations and drawbacks one way or another. Besides these approaches to irony, the adaptation theory is vastly different and satisfactory. Verschueren tries to integrate cognitive, social and cultural elements into the study of pragmatics and has furthered the development of pragmatics.In this thesis, the researcher aims to answer four questions. The first is ' What do people do when using irony ?' Perhaps we will get quite different answers from different domains. From the perspective of Adaptation Theory language use can be defined as the continuous making of linguistic choices. The second is 'What do ironists adapt to?' In order to reach or approach some positive or negative goals, the communicators choose irony as his/her communicative means because of its intralinguistic features. Meanwhile, the use of irony can adapt into the preference of social conventions and psychological intentions and consciousness. The functions of irony, such as criticism, humor, persuasion, encouragement, and emphasis areachieved in the process of adaptation. The third one is 'how is the adaptation processed?' We discover that the adaption of irony is processed dynamically in relation to the temporal and contextual dimensions and different targets. The last one directing the research is 'What is the medium of adaptability? 'The making of choices in general as well as the contributing mental processes is subject to different manners of processing. In particular, they can all take place with different degrees of personal salience and social salience.In the present research, by adopting the pragmatic perspective, linguistic adaptation model in particular, irony is pragmatically analyzed as adaptation to the physical, social and mental elements in language use and language interpretation. Meanwhile the adaptation is processed dynamically, and the medium of adaptation is salience.