A Study Of Generation And Interpretation Of Irony Based On The Relevance-Integration Model

Irony (verbal irony) is a special language form which is widely used in our daily communications. It usually appears by way of expressing positive intention in negative wording while negative intention in positive wording. Owing to its ubiquity and popularity, irony has caught many scholars'eyes. Initial researches having been done on it began from the perspective of rhetoric, and later extended gradually to psychology and linguistics especially cognitive linguistics. These researches in different fields led to great achievements, such as Grice's Standard Theory, Giora's Graded Salience Hypothesis, Sperber and Wilson's Echoic Mention Theory, Clark and Gerrig's Pretense Theory and so on. After a detailed analysis of these theories on irony, the author of this paper finds that none of these theories alone can account for the complicated linguistic form of irony perfectly, especially can account for the meaning construction of irony wholly and dynamically due to the deficiency of each theory and the complexity of irony. Relevance Theory (RT) and Conceptual Integration Theory (CIT) respectively aim to identify the cognitive mechanisms underlying the verbal communication and reveal the on-line dynamic meaning construction of natural language from the perspective of cognition. Taking this in consideration, this thesis intends to integrate Relevance Theory with Conceptual Integration Theory to explore the dynamic meaning construction of irony, trying to reveal the inner cognitive mechanisms behind it.A qualitative method is mainly adopted in this thesis. After selection and classification of the collected data, irony is analyzed in the light of the Relevance-Integration Model. Meaning construction of irony is a dynamic process involving the speaker's generation and the hearer's integration of irony. Generation of irony works in this way:the speaker, out of a certain motive, is triggered by reverse thinking and builds up two contrastive mental spaces by putting the contrastive information of the same reference into the same utterance. Under the guidance of Relevance Principle, input concepts make cross-mapping and selective projection with the assumptions from cognitive context. With a failure of projection, a new mental space in which the hearer's inference contrasts with the reality space appears. The speaker then guides the hearer with the help of some linguistic or extra-linguistic cues to a fresh mental space which is different from the original one while reasonably connected with the reality space. The implicit ironical meaning comes into being in the emergent space. The process of irony interpretation is similar to that of irony generation:stimulated by the manifest information from the input spaces, the hearer draws the optimal contextual assumption from his cognitive context to interact with the stimulus under the guidance of the Relevance Principles. Through cross-mapping and projection, the hearer's inference is in contrast with the reality space, a clash space occurs with the failure of projection, which triggers the hearer's associative ability, especially the associative ability by contrast. Then driven by this kind of associative ability by contrast, the hearer has to select the contextual assumption again and builds up a new space which is contradictory to the belief space while corresponds to reality to interpret the utterance. With the occurrence of the emergent structure, the ironic intention conveyed by the speaker is interpreted successfully.Relevance-Integration Model provides a new perspective for the dynamic meaning construction of irony, which makes some valuable contribution to the present study of irony. Meanwhile, studying the meaning construction of irony can promote the correct use and understanding of irony.