A Study Of The Generation And Understanding Mechanism Of Verbal Irony From The Perspective Of Philosophy Of Mind

As an important form of language expressions,irony has been widely concerned by the linguistic circles at home and abroad.With the rise of psycholinguistics and cognitive linguistics,the study of irony has a new situation but faces new challenges as well.There are two main aspects in the study of verbal irony from the perspective of mind.First,the study of irony has gone through the development stage from pragmatics to cognitive linguistics,but only a few scholars have done researches on verbal irony from the perspective of mind.Therefore,researches are still in the primary stage,and their comprehensiveness and systematicness need to be further improved.Second,scholars have examined factors that influence cognition of irony from generation,understanding,contextual,and cognitive individuals,but most of the studies only focus on one of them as a variable.Therefore,in order to explore the mechanism of actions of human mind,scholars need to explore further the interaction between various factors.In view of this,this paper attempts to analyze and study the generation and understanding mechanism of verbal irony based on Xu's theory of philosophy of mind and language research.Consequently,considering the multiple variables that affect the generation and understanding of verbal irony,the paper forms a unified computational model of verbal irony.This study shows that: first,intentionality is an indispensable part in the study of generation and understanding of verbal irony.For both the listener and the speaker,verbal irony can only be generated and understood with intentionality.Second,in the process of the generation and understanding of verbal irony,conscious activities are everywhere,and the doublet structure of consciousness is the cornerstone of the generation and understanding of verbal irony.The activities of consciousness should have supports of qualia structure,and the core meaning of verbal irony can form a network structure of conceptual relations.Third,consciousness emerges as a language expression with novel characteristics under actions of three modes of thinking,perceptual thinking,logical thinking and insight thinking.Finally,on basis of these analyses,the author forms the computational model of generation and understanding mechanism of verbal irony.The contributions of this thesis are following: first,this paper has developed the research of the perspective of mind of verbal irony and revealed the generation and understanding mechanism of it,which provides a new idea and perspective for the study of verbal irony.Second,the unified computational model of verbal irony is generated from analyzing the generation and understanding mechanism of verbal irony in this paper,which makes learners know the generation and understanding of verbal irony at a glance.Third,this paper explains the generation and understanding mechanism of verbal irony and introduces some working mechanisms of it,which can help English learners understand verbal irony better from the height of theory.This paper could also improve learner's abilities to use verbal irony effectively.