Irony Interpretation And Ironic Communication

Irony is frequently used as a figure of speech and has attracted scholars' attention for centuries. Traditionally irony has been studied as a discursive strategy intended to communicate the opposite of what the utterance literally means. However, it is nowadays commonly accepted that ironies convey a much greater variety of meanings than the mere opposite, and a great deal of scholarly discussion concerning irony is still going on and practically no agreement is reached. Recent years have seen a variety of characterizations of irony. Given the range of perspectives - pragmatic, psychological, and literary - the essential focus of such studies has remained constant: the overwhelming concern has been with verbal irony, and the object of investigation has been the ironic utterance, either in isolation or in the context of a constructed text.This thesis aims to review the previous research results and provides insight in interpreting such phenomenon in communication from different aspects. It is a dynamic research that explores the actual application and communicative functions of verbal irony. The thesis consists of five chapters. Chapter One is a general introduction of irony, including its history, definition and categorization. The history of irony dates back to ancient times, when Socrates first established the most influential model. For centuries, many people have given many definitions, but few are accepted as a satisfactory one. Classifying irony is also a very confusing job, but the paper tries to present a categorization from pragmatic perspective. Chapter Two reviews the previous major theories of irony developed by Grice, Searle, Leech, Giora, Wilson and Sperber, Clark and Gerrig, etc. Their research branches out into many subjects like semantics, pragmatics, philosophy, psycholinguistics and cognitive pragmatics. These studies have pictured the new research development of irony in last century. Chapter Three is devoted to the identification of irony in communicative contexts. It includes how to process and understand irony and irony recognition with the help of contextual sources. Irony recognition is a multidimensional process, because it depends on an interaction between 1) the linguistic form and the immediate context, 2) linguistic material and mutuality, 3) the speaker and hearer. It requires listeners to understand not only the literal...