A Cognitive-Pragmatic Interpretation Of Verbal Irony

Irony is a pervasive language phenomenon with distinctive charm. For centuries rhetoricians have never slackened their painstaking efforts in giving descriptive or prescriptive delineation of various facets of irony so as to offer guidelines for people's better understanding and application of it as a figure of speech. Modern linguists, pragmatists and cognitive linguists in particular, have penetrated deeper into this old puzzle by proposing different approaches.Scholars notice that the most mysterious part of irony lies in the question why an utterance can be expressed in an ironical way while its meaning may go to the opposite semantic direction. Researchers are puzzled by the cognitive mechanism underlying the interpretation of irony. Some studies hit upon this issue with inspiring ideas, such as relevance theory (RT) and conceptual blending theory (CBT). Although RT provides a general principle for pragmatic inference and CBT reveals the dynamic cognitive mechanism of ironic communication by virtue of mental spaces mapping and blending, none of them however, have accounted for it satisfactorily and completely. Therefore, they only have partial explanatory power for irony.This being the case, the present study tries to develop a pragmatic-cognitive way in investigating into the inner mechanism of irony and intends to make some tentative explorations in this direction. Based on an analysis of the merits and demerits of RT and CBT as well as their compatibility, we introduce an integrated RT-CBT model. According to the model, the process of irony interpretation undergoes four steps: cross-space mapping, space mismatch, space transformation and space check. What's more, the crucial role of inference, relevance and context are absorbed in this model. Irony interpretation, in nature, is a process of mutual manifestness and mental space integration.At last, a case study is conducted in which the integrated RT-CBT model is used to analyze the interpretative process of some ironic utterances in Lu Xun's works so as to verify the feasibility and explanatory power of the model and deepen the readers' understanding of these works. It is hoped that the integrated RT-CBT model can be improved in the future study for analyzing more linguistic phenomena including indirect speech acts, etc.