A Study Of Giora's Irony Theory With A Review Of Verbal Ironies In Pride And Prejudice

This paper makes a tentative application of Giora's irony theory to analyzing examples of verbal irony in Austen's Pride and Prejudice, attempting to check the descriptive and explanatory power of Giora's irony theory, and to gain a deep understanding of that theory as well as a detailed insight into the phenomenon of irony.The comparison between Giora's approach and the Standard Pragmatic Model proposed mainly by Grice indicates that though Giora's theory is grounded on the Standard Pragmatic Model, it detaches from and develops the Model by original proposals—"irony as indirect negation," "negation as mitigation in negative ironies," "salience hypothesis," and "literal meaning functions throughout the process." Hence it has theoretical importance and deserves the study carried out in this paper. Based on the study of Giora's irony theory, this paper employs Giora's main proposals to analyze examples of verbal irony extracted from Pride and Prejudice, and then discusses the strengths and weaknesses of these proposals.Giora's irony theory has contributed to the study of irony by making up for some deficiencies of the Model in explaining irony comprehension. The two proposals of "negation as mitigation in negative ironies" and "literal meaning functions throughout the process" provide plausible explanations for degree of ironicity, a topic which has not been touched upon by the Model. However, the descriptive and explanatory power of Giora's theory is still limited. In addition to the problem left over by the Model—how to distinguish irony from metaphor, Giora's theory itself has weaknesses: The concept of "indirect negation" is somewhat vague;"salience hypothesis" can merely explain some verbal ironies;and discussions on the function of context in irony comprehension, the attitudes conveyed and the pragmatic functions of irony are insufficient. Due to the deficiencies of Giora's irony theory as well as the complexity of irony, it is advisable to integrate Giora's theory and other theories of irony to gain a deeper and more complete understanding of the phenomenon of irony.