A Cognitive Study Of Irony-Based On Blending Theory

Irony is a ubiquitous linguistic phenomenon in verbal communication. People often employ irony in communication consciously or unconsciously. Because of its popularity and universality, lots of studies on it have been done, first from the perspective of rhetoric. Later, scholars begin to study it from different perspectives, such as psychological perspective and pragmatic perspective. This thesis, based on their achievements, intends to analyze and disclose the internal cognitive mechanisms of irony generation and comprehension with the blending theory on its theoretical basis.Blending theory has been developed by Fauconnier from the mental space theory. It elaborates a general model of meaning construction in which a small set of partially compositional processes operate in analogy, metaphor, counterfactuals, and many other semantic and pragmatic phenomena. It applies conceptual mapping between mental spaces and conceptual blending to analyzing concrete pragmatic phenomena. Fauconnier summarizes five main features of blending theory, namely cross-space mapping, partial projection from inputs, generic space, integration of events, and emergent structure through composition, completion, and elaboration. In the light of the blending theory, the process of blending is a kind of dynamic, creative cognitive activity.Under the guidance of the blending theory, this thesis analyzes the internal cognitive processes of irony generation and comprehension in a relatively deep meticulous way. In irony generation, the speaker, driven by some certain motives but constrained by some contextual factors, produces ironic utterances by blending that involves a complex four-space blend. In irony comprehension, mental spaces are built up inpart by recruiting structures from both conceptual domains and contextual information. The participants in irony comprehension build up incompatible mental space by recruiting structures from the same conceptual domains. Through partial cross-space mappings, each kind of conceptual structure is projected onto the blended space and reconstructed. The blending creates the emergent structure, which represents the completion of the on-line ironic meaning construction. Hence, the participants can understand the ironic meaning. Moreover, the factors of participants in an utterance and the contextual factors are indispensable in the processes of irony generation and comprehension.