A Contrastive Study Of English And Chinese Ironical Metaphors From Cog-linguistic Perspective

Irony is a common language phenomenon in verbal communication which has been studied for a long time. However, most studies remained on the surface of language, and few researchers considered irony as a concept or a special kind of cognitive metaphor. The author, based on the previous studies, regards irony as a special kind of metaphor, namely, ironical metaphor, which maps between two subordinate cognitive domains under the same super-ordinate cognitive domain, involving a stereotypical relation between two cognitive domains via proximity. The main corpora come from the Chinese talk show Tonight 80's Talk Show, the British talk show Russell Howard's Good News and the American talk show The Ellen DeGeneres Show, all of which contain typical irony language and to some extent, can be seen as representatives. Therefore, this thesis, within the framework of stereotypical relation theory, makes a study of the data collected, then analyzes the production and interpretation mechanism of ironical metaphors in English and Chinese talk shows from the perspective of cognitive linguistics, and further discusses the common characteristics of metaphor mappings and the common perception and thought of different nations as for linguistic expression.Studying the production and interpretation mechanism of ironical metaphors, the author finds that the ironies produced in a metaphorical way can be considered as ironical metaphors, which can be cognized by the opposite directional proximity between the cognitive domains. Besides, the study finds that people of different nations interpret and produce ironies in almost the same way, thus it further proves that metaphor mappings have common characteristics and different nations have common perception and thought for linguistic expression. This study enriches the irony research system by adding an empirical investigation in the field of irony. At the same time, it analyzes the linguistic forms of irony, summarizes its pragmatic functions in the talk show programs and displays the law in language using, which contributes to the analysis and regulation of language.This thesis consists of five chapters. The first chapter is the introduction, introducing the background and significance of the research, as well as the corpus sources and the whole structure of the thesis. The second chapter is the literature review which reviews the related research of irony and metaphor both at home and abroad and provides the limitation of current academic research. The third chapter is the theoretical framework of stereotypical relation. The fourth chapter analyzes the production and interpretation mechanism of ironical metaphors in English and Chinese talk shows and summarizes its pragmatic functions in talk shows. The fifth chapter is the conclusion part, including major findings, contributions as well as limitations and suggestions for the further research.