An Analysis Of Irony In Desperate Housewives

Irony, as a pervasively-used language phenomenon in our daily lives, has come toattentions of various scholars in different disciplines because of its unique linguistic charm.Even so, the present study on irony only stays on its production and the illustration onirony from its production and interpretation still lags far behind its frequent use. Therefore,this paper introduces a newly emerging pragmatic Model, Adaptation-relevance Model, inanticipation of getting more comprehensive results from a completely new perspective tostudy irony. So to some degree, this paper, on one hand, can be considered as an expansionof an Adaptation-relevance Model, giving a full-fledged supplement to its researchcontents and putting its steps on a more expansive social-cultural field. On the other hand,this paper also offers a new perspective to the research of irony.By consulting and referring to the previous studies of irony, this paper takesAdaptation-relevance Model as theoretical support and attempts to explore the productionand interpretation of irony in American TV Series Desperate Housewives from theperspective of pragmatics to verify its feasibility when this newly emerging pragmaticModel is applied to the study of irony. In this paper, by adopting qualitative method as themain method， the author concretely studies the adaptation and relevance in the process ofuse of irony from four aspects, that is, the relevance-oriented process of the productionand interpretation of verbal irony; participating process of the contextual presumption ofproduction and interpretation of verbal irony; the inter-adaptation of production andinterpretation of verbal irony; the strategy-choosing process of production andinterpretation of verbal irony and tries to resolve the following issues:1). In verbalcommunication, why does the speaker choose to use irony instead of other language formsor strategies?2). In verbal communication, how does the speaker employ irony?3). In amutual interaction of communication, how can the hearer correspondingly have a clearunderstanding of ironical utterance and respond to it?This paper finds that:1). Human cognition is relevance-oriented, and it is the pursuitof optimal relevance that drives ironist to prefer ironical utterance.2). The use of verbalirony is an adaptation process based on relevance. The ironical producer needs to formsome contextual presumption for pursuit of optimal relevance. Based on the contextualpresumption, the producer is obliged to make inter-adaptation between his contextualcorrelates and linguistic forms, which involves a strategic choice.3). In a mutual communication, the ironical interpreter also needs to form certain contextual presumptionbased on what the ironist said with guide of the pursuit for optimal relevance, makeinter-adaptation between ironist’s linguistic forms and contextual correlates, and combinesthe ironist’s strategic choice to infer and understand ironist’s meaning as well as makedifferent responses in various situations. Mostly, three types of responses are demonstrated:to accept irony; to deny irony; to ignore irony.