A Cognitive Pragmatic Perspective Of Understanding Irony

Irony is an ancient rhetoric device in the history of human language study. At the very beginning, rhetoric devices such as metaphor, synecdoche, metonymy and irony were used to better understand and perceive the real world in human beings’ activities. Like the former three rhetoric devices, irony is a universal feature in language use, and it is used not only in daily conversations but in literary works. There are many reasons for people to use irony, such as to produce more ironic, sarcastic effect and to make their speech acts more polite. However, there are fewer studies on irony than on the other three rhetoric devices of metaphor, synecdoche and metonymy. Moreover, most of the researches on irony are from the rhetoric or aesthetic perspective, for people just take irony as a kind of rhetoric device. The writer or speaker uses ironic utterances to express ideas and the reader or listener tries to understand the true meaning. Obviously, the process of producing and comprehending ironic utterances is related to the human cognition. Since 1970 s, the study on rhetoric devices has become broader and broader, from the traditional rhetoric and aesthetics perspectives to psychology, language philosophy, pragmatics and cognitive linguistics, which provide new perspectives to the research on irony, and since then, the research on irony begins to turn to the cognitive and pragmatic perspectives.As one of the ancient rhetoric devices, irony appears frequently in daily conversation and literature in the form of indirect expressions. It is not only a traditional rhetoric device but also a kind of communication strategy. It is a special way of thinking containing a contrast between discourse proposition and the speaker or writer’s intention. In other words, it is the opposite of the surface meaning and implicit meaning. To understand the ironic utterances relies not only on the structure of language but also the tone and emotion of the speaker or the related context. It is rather easy to recognize and understand irony in daily communication. But without the tone of the speaker, it is relatively hard to recognize and understand irony in literary works. In this circumstance, how to recognize and understand ironic utterances in literature largely depends on the cognitive context of the participants. However, the process of understanding the ironic utterances is not that simple. The limitation of shared context or the deviation of cognition may have effects on the understanding of ironic utterances. Therefore, it is significantly necessary to study irony form the cognitive pragmatic perspective. It can help people understanding the literature works better and English as foreign language learners better using and understanding irony.In addition, as their living environment is different, Chinese and Western people have different cultural traditions, which also results in different modes of thinking. Chinese people show a thinking and cognitive schema of valuing overall situation, valuing friendship, weighting the mainstream consciousness. In contrast, Western people show a distinctive characteristic of valuing rational, gravimetric analysis, and a complete form. These differences may become a barrier for Chinese people to understand English especially when there is an irony in verbal communication.For this reason, this thesis attempts to discuss the ways of how to understand English irony from the perspective of cognitive pragmatics, hoping to help EFL learners better read and understand literary works in English original. On the recognition of the existing studies of irony, the theoretical framework of the research is mainly based on Sperber & Wilson’s Relevance Theory and Leech’s Politeness Theory, and the method used in the research is the qualitative study choosing the ironic utterances from Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift as the analytical material and corpus.This thesis is divided into five parts. The first part is the introduction to the research, which includes the research backgrounds, research significance, and the methodology. The second part is the literature review, giving a brief introduction to the history of irony, concluding the present research of irony and illustrating the necessity for studying irony from the perspective of cognitive pragmatics. The third part is the theoretical framework of the study, which introduces the reason for choosing this novel and Relevance Theory and Politeness Principle as theoretical devices. The fourth part is the main part, where the ironic utterances chosen from the novel were analyzed in the framework of the cognitive pragmatic theories. And the last part is a general conclusion of the research containing a brief summary of the study, the major findings and the limitations of the study.