Contextual Activation Of Verbal Irony

With Sperber and Wilson's echoic-interpretation theory of irony and the relevance-theoretic approach to context as background, Yus's model of irony comprehension as the core of the theoretical framework, the present research attempts to reveal verbal irony's richness of meaning, diversity of function and complexity of use, especially in the case of literary texts.The echoic-interpretation theory of irony defines verbal irony as a variety of echoic interpretive use, in which the communicator dissociates himself from the opinion echoed with accompanying ridicule or scorn. As a further development of Sperber and Wilson's hypothesis, Yus's model of irony comprehension makes further study on how the hearer identify the speaker's dissociative attitude during ironic communication. He assumes that some kind of incompatibility between the information provided by contextual sources and the proposition expressed by the utterance is necessary to foreground the speaker's dissociative attitude, thus helping the hearer to grasp the ironic interpretation of utterances. Yus (2000) summarizes seven irony-relevant contextual sources:A. Encyclopedic, factual information; B. Mutually manifest physical environment (setting); C. Speaker's nonverbal behavior; D. Addressee's background knowledge of addresser's biographical data; E. Mutual knowledge. F. Previous utterances in the conversation; G. Linguistic cues. Yus's criterion of optimal accessibility to irony has been proposed to account for the different possibilities in irony comprehension.More significantly, on the basis of the theoretical framework discussed above, this paper makes a case study of verbal irony in Fortress Besieged. Thirty-one examples of verbal irony are selected and classified into seven groups according to the different contextual information activated during ironical communication. This paper makes a significant attempt to the combination of cognitive pragmatics and literary criticism. As a part of the development of literary pragmatics, it calls for further studies.