On The Comprehension Of Irony In Implicit Conflict Talk From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

Irony is a statement whose literal meaning is opposite to the intended meaning of the speaker and this statement often indicates a dissociative attitude or evaluation. Relevance theory(hereafter abbreviated as RT) is a cognitive pragmatic theory regarding utterance comprehension. Based on RT, Spanish scholar Yus analyzes seven types of contextual assumptions in irony comprehension. Implicit conflict talk(hereafter abbreviated as ICT) consists of “utterances produced by each of the two parties involved in an interaction in order to express, in an implicit way, their goals which are in conflict with each other”. In the previous studies of ICT, irony is discussed only as one of the “veils” covering the speaker's intended meaning. No explanation has been given as to how the ironic utterance is comprehended in ICT.On the basis of RT and Yus' s framework of irony comprehension, this research discusses the process of irony comprehension in ICT and establishes a model of irony comprehension in ICT based on the data. First, 26 examples of ICT containing irony from popular movies, classical plays and novels are collected. And then the comprehension process of irony is analyzed from the perspective of the hearer. The results show that among the seven types of contextual assumptions proposed by Yus, only six of them are found out in ICT. Moreover, there occurs a new type of contextual assumption in ICT—subsequent utterances. Consequently, there are also seven types of contextual assumptions in ICT, which are: 1) encyclopedic and factual information, 2) speaker's nonverbal behavior, 3) hearer's background knowledge of speaker's biographical data, 4) mutual knowledge, 5) previous utterances, 6) subsequent utterances and 7) linguistic cues. Our data also shows that the role of these seven types of contextual assumptions in the understanding of irony in ICT is not equal: the third and fourth types are the leading contextual assumptions while the rest five types are the supportive ones. According to statistics, the proportions of each of the above contextual assumptions in our data are 15%, 23%, 100%, 100%, 8%, 23% and 12%. Based on that, a model for irony comprehension in ICT is finally established.