A Cognitive Pragmatic Study Of Irony

The irony study has a long history. Traditionally, irony has only been taken as afigure of speech. Studies of irony were mainly focused on the rhetorical andaesthetical aspects, such as Socratic irony, dramatic irony, situational irony and so on.In recent years, it has gradually attracted the interest of psycholinguists, cognitivelinguists and other scholars. They have provided new perspectives for the study ofirony, and the study on the understanding and interpretation of irony begin to shift topragmatic and cognitive perspective. A lot of research was conducted on therelationship between the cognitive mechanism of human beings and the interpretationof figurative language, such as irony. The study of Chinese irony-fanyu is the mainconcern of the present study. In Chinese, there exist verbal expressions which aresimilar to irony in English, especially in terms of their pragmatic functions. ButChinese irony is quite different from English irony in that the former usually refers toa kind of artistic skill and no classification is made between dramatic irony, situationalirony, and comic irony. Apart from that, Chinese irony or fanyu does not mean thesame thing as fanfeng which involves no semantic opposition.The present study does not lay much emphasis on the comprehensive explicationof the characteristics of Chinese irony. After studying a lot of previous scholars’studies and research, Chinese irony serves as a figure of speech which achievesemphasis (such as sarcasm, humor) by saying the opposite of what is meant, theintended meaning of the words being the opposite of their usual senses. This definitionalso serves as the characteristic of Chinese irony distinguishing it from other figuresof speech. Such semantic anomaly of irony is not only a kind of pragmaticphenomenon, but also the result of human cognitive processes. Therefore, the purposeof this thesis is not only to study Chinese irony from the cognitive pragmaticperspective but also to set up a new model to interpret the cognitive processes in theuse of irony. The cognitive elements and pragmatic factors are used to explain theunderlying mechanism of irony, namely Working Mechanism of Chinese Irony Basedon Mental Models. According to the speaker’s intention, Chinese irony can be divided into two types: positive attitude irony and negative attitude irony, with the formerconveying the speaker’s positive attitude by negative wording and the latterexpressing the speaker’s negative attitude by positive wording.In the thesis, proximity is defined by stereotypical relations. Stereotypicalrelations link the knowledge to form the hierarchical structure of mental models. Thismodel will be applied to analyze the production and interpretation of Chinese irony toform Working Mechanism of Chinese Irony Based on Mental Models. Oppositedirectional transference of meaning involved in irony results from psychologicalassociation, that is the stereotypical relations. Specifically, proximity used as thesemantic association in irony has its own structure of information connection. In thecase of irony, if the hearer is aware of the mismatching between literal meanings andintended meanings, he will search for the possible alternatives and find out which oneis most compatible with the context. In this process, the hearer is guided by proximityprinciple and constrained by context to construct a continuum ranging from thepositive point to the negative point. The processing of irony lies in choosing the valuewhich is most compatible with the given context. On the other hand, the speaker isconstrained by the ironical intention to construct a continuum to encode his intentioninto an ironical utterance. The use of irony as explained above is based onparticipants’ cognitive abilities and constrained by context. Irony, as a kind ofcognitive ability, functions in the context.