A Cognitive Research On The Verbal Irony In The Big Bang Theory

Verbal irony is the main type of irony.It is ubiquitous in our daily communication and it is a kind of distinctive and important way of human communication.A good comprehension and employment of verbal irony not only helps us better express our thoughts but also facilitates processing and understanding others' ironic utterances.For a long time,irony has caused wide attention of researchers from many fields of study such as philosophy,rhetoric,linguistics etc.Since the rise of cognitive dialogic syntax,although some scholars have already tentatively applied the viewpoint of this theory to analyze irony,they have neither systematic analytical framework nor the support of closed linguistic data.Taking cognitive dialogic syntax theory as a theoretical view,this thesis attempts to set up a new analytical model---ADR model on the basis of dialogic resonance of dialogic syntax and Autonomy/Dependence Alignment.At the same time,this thesis chooses representative ironic dialogues from currently classical situation comedy The Big Bang Theory as linguistic data,and adopts qualitative and quantitative methodology to analyze those verbal ironies by case study,in order to explore the cognitive mechanism of verbal irony in the hope of providing a new theory supporting for further study on the special linguistic phenomenon of verbal irony.Through the selection,classification and examination of the 160 collected English verbal ironies,this thesis discovered that(1)Among those 160 collected data,there are 61 direction and immediate resonance,47 resonance of others' thoughts or opinions and 52 resonance of social norms or standard expectations.The proportion respectively is 38.1%,29.4% and 32.5%;(2)The direct and immediate resonance belongs to explicit resonance,and resonance of others' thoughts or opinions belongs to implicit resonance,while resonance of social norms or standard expectations belongs to half-implicit resonance;(3)Verbal irony is highly dependent on context,and resonance of others' thoughts or opinions is the most high degree of dependence on context;(4)The mental motivation of the speakers who chooses verbal irony may be out of certain desire of expressing some attitudes,such as opposite opinion,criticism,sarcasm,humor,politeness,etc.;(5)The cognitive process of verbal irony is a cognitive process of resonating and interpreting the prior speaker's utterances.By resonating with what has been told via ironic utterances,the speaker expresses his denial and disapproving attitude and meanwhile creating such contextual effects as sarcasm and humor.