Understanding Pragmatic Effects Of Verbal Irony From A Cognitive Perspective: Contrast Effects On Some Major Pragmatic Functions

Traditional study takes irony as a figure of speech that achieves emphasis and thus has been focusing on the rhetorical and aesthetical aspects of it. Since 1970s, pragmatics, psycholinguistics and cognitive linguistics have provided a new perspective for the study of irony, and the study on the comprehension or interpretation of irony began to shift to the pragmatic and cognitive investigation. Especially in recent years, with the interpretation of irony becoming the main focus, more and more linguists tend to explore irony from a cognitive perspective since there is a close relationship between people's comprehension ability and cognition. Based on this, more researches are conducted, which mainly focus on the relationship between a cognitive mechanism of human beings named patterns of perceptual or cognitive biasing effects and the interpretation of figurative language.Studies have demonstrated that contrast vs. assimilation effects caused by this cognitive biasing mechanism have prediction effects on the comprehension of pragmatic functions of figurative language, especially on the degree of criticism expressed by the verbal irony speakers. Actually in their early studies Colston and Keller have stated that there is a potential link between patterns of perceptual or cognitive biasing effects and the interpreting effects in verbal irony. Based on this framework this thesis intends to explore the link between this kind of cognitive pattern and other major pragmatic functions of verbal irony besides criticism, e.g. negation, expectation, humor, surprise, compliment, etc, and also whether they are always in direct proportion to the degree of contrast.In this study, a questionnaire composed of twelve scenarios in six pairs, with each representing one certain attitude of the speakers, is adopted. Descriptive analysis in terms of several major pragmatic functions of ironic utterances is carried out. All statistics, including the frequency of each statement in each scenario and the percentage of different selections, are conducted with the employment of SPSS11.0. The results from this study demonstrate that contrast effects have the same prediction effects on the comprehension of other major pragmatic functions expressed by ironic utterances, and most of them are in direct proportion to the contrast effects except one—speaker's self-protection effect Moreover, being expressed in an ironic way, the same expressing effects will be reached as the speaker expresses his intended attitudes literally, which creates no contrast effect at all. Factors that may affect the pragmatic effects of ironic utterances are discussed, e.g. negative consequence and gender.Limitations of the present study are mentioned in the last part of this thesis. Some implications for further research are also put forward. It is expected that this study of the comprehension of ironic utterances from a cognitive pragmatic perspective will promote our perception or comprehension about ironic utterances to a higher status.