A Study Of Verbal Irony From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

Irony is a universal linguistic phenomenon.The study of irony is divided into two stages.The first one is based on the traditional irony concept;its core idea is that irony is the opposite of what is meant.The representative researcher is Grice(1975).The second one is the theories which have been developed in the past twenty or thirty years.The opinions of those theories towards irony are different from those of traditional concept,which even completely abandons the traditional view of the irony.The more influential theories are Sperber and Wilson'echo mention theory(1998),and Clark and Gerrig's pretense theory(1984).In these theories,Sperber and Wilson's echo mention theory is the first to explain the phenomenon of irony from a cognitive perspective.Later,Sperber and Wilson put study on irony within the framework of relevance theory and modified the echo mention theory,and proposed a theory of irony based on the relevance theory,which plays a major role in studying on irony.Predecessors draw different conclusions to their studies from rhetoric to cognitive pragmatics.This research tries to carry out the analysis of irony in Friends to explain the phenomenon of verbal irony based on the relevance theory proposed by Sperber and Wilson to reveal the production and mechanism of interpretation of verbal irony.Relevance theory abandons the traditional mode of communication codes,and proposes the ostensive-inferential mode.From the perspective of relevance theory,it holds that communication is a mutual process of cognitive inference,the aim of communication is to change the listener's cognitive context and listener understands the discourse through the construction of context and inference.It takes effort in processing discourse,and the cognitive effects are achieved,their relationship is relevance.In the framework of relevance theory,irony is the speaker's response to the ideas of others,and at the same time expressing their negative attitude to achieve ironic effect.The data of verbal irony is collected from Friends.There are the following two questions proposed:1.What pragmatic functions does verbal irony perform in Friends?2.What is the cognitive mechanism for the production and interpretation of verbal irony based on the relevance theory?Data analysis and discussion have revealed some following findings: 1)Verbal irony mainly perform the negative functions,up to 58.8%,such as criticism and mockery;the positive functions are also implemented,such as humor,politeness,intimacy and emphasis in which humor occupies 31.4% because its theme is the life and love of young people in this play,which embodies the communication style American younger generation.In the ironic utterances,the negative functions of verbal irony accounts for the leading role,while the positive functions also takes a considerable supporting role;2)The production and ·mechanism of understanding of verbal irony is the process of searching for the relevance during which the speaker is involved in ostension while the listener is involved in inference.The data analysis shows that,on one hand,the speaker produces verbal irony by ostension and ironic stimulus in the communication;on the other hand,listener interprets the verbal irony by inference according to the cognitive context.The context environment plays an essential part in the interpretation of verbal irony.