An Adaptation Theory Approach To Verbal Irony

Irony is an intelligent and witty figure of speech, it's"a means of expression which suggests (humorously or angrily) a different meaning for the words used."(Procter 2001: 1337) As a common and special linguistic phenomenon in communication, irony has many kinds of classifications. The study of this thesis is restricted to verbal irony. As a fascinating linguistic and communicative phenomenon, irony has attracted broad attention of linguists, philosophers, psychologists, and other scholars. Although the use of irony is closely related to social, cultural, and even cognitive factors, none of the previous approaches has studied irony from a comprehensive perspective. This thesis points out that the problems, which can not be disposed within those traditional theories, can be resolved within the theoretical framework of Verschueren's Adaptation Theory. Different from the traditional componential view on pragmatics, the Adaptation Theory has integrated cognitive, social and cultural elements into the study of pragmatics and has served as the theoretical foundation for the present study.This thesis aims to explore why irony, an unusual and fascinating linguistic phenomenon and communicative strategy, occurs so frequently. From the perspective of the Adaptation Theory, language use can be taken as the continuous making of linguistic choices by adapting to the relevant contextual elements. Irony is one kind of language phenomena. Thus irony is also a result of choice-making and a product of adaptation in order to achieve some particular goals. In order to reach or approach these particular goals, the utterers choose irony as the most appropriate strategy by adapting to those contextual factors. By adopting the pragmatic perspective, this thesis has analyzed that irony is the result of adaptation to the physical, social and mental worlds of the utterer and the interpreter. Then, with a lot of examples, this thesis demonstrates the dynamic adaptation process between irony and the contextual correlates. The making of linguistic choices mainly results from the degrees of individual and social salience1. Under certain linguistic contexts, the different degrees of the individual and social salience of the utterer and the interpreter can influence the success of irony.The present study of irony from the adaptation perspective may help to enrich the research on verbal irony and shed light on the reasons why irony happens so frequently in our daily communication.