A Study Of Irony From The Perspective Of Adaptation Theory

This thesis is devoted to the study of irony within the framework of Verschueren's Adaptation Theory, which views language use as a choice-making process of linguistic forms as well as pragmatic strategies towards the adaptation to the physical, social and cognitive contexts. In the present study, irony is defined as the speech act which conveys a conversational implicature different from or similar to its surface meaning and which, at the same time, serves as a communicative strategy chosen by language users to approach points of satisfaction for communicative needs.Most of the previous studies on irony have taken a semantic, logical or pragmatic approach to the problem, which, though contradictory to each other in some respects, lay a necessary foundation for the more creative researches of the same field such as Verschueren's Adaptation Theory, which takes the cognitive, social and cultural factors into consideration in pragmatic researches, including the research on irony.This thesis is aimed at answering three general questions. The first question concerns the properties of ironical choices. Seen from the perspective of Adaptation Theory, choice of ironical utterance can be located at every level of linguistic structure, ranging from languages, codes, styles to utterances and utterance clusters. This concerns the property of variability, which is defined as the range of possibilities from which choices can be made. Another property of ironic choice is its negotiability, which means that ironic choice is made on the basis of highly flexible principles and strategies. The third property of ironic choice is its adaptability, which points to the language users'pragmatic motive of getting adapted to the contextual variants. Adaptability is the intrinsic property of ironical utterances.The second question concerns the principle and pragmatic apparatus of irony cognition. Adaptability is the general principle of irony cognition. The utterer shows a counter-expectational mismatch to the hearer through ironic expression and thus trigger his salience. Mutuality between the ironist and the hearer is the precondition for successful irony interpretation, that is, the hearer must be aware of the utterer's special, private or"inside"knowledge necessary for the derivation of the intended ironic message. The third question concerns the process of ironical communication. Use of irony is a process in which dynamic meaning is generated in relation to the temporal, contextual and structural dimensions.