A Note On The Production-Interpretation Mechanism Of Irony

Irony is a pervasive language phenomenon with distinctive charm. For centuries, rhetoricians have never slackened their painstaking efforts in giving descriptive or prescriptive delineation of various facets of irony so as to offer guidelines for people's better understanding and applying of it as a figure of speech. Modern linguists, pragmatists and cognitive linguists in particular, have penetrated deeper into this old puzzle by proposing different approaches. Scholars notice that the most mysterious part of irony lies in the fact that an utterance can be expressed in an ironical way whereas its meaning may go to the opposite semantic direction. Researchers are puzzled by the cognitive mechanism underlying the production and interpretation of irony. Some studies hit upon this issue with inspiring ideas; none of them, however, have accounted for it satisfactorily and got wide recognition up to now. This being the case, the present study tries to develop a cognitive interest in the inner mechanism of irony and intends to make some tentative explorations in this direction.The central question of this study is: What exactly backs up the use of irony in the perspective of mental activities? This question might be specifically divided into the following two interrelated questions:1. How does the speaker replace the direct expression with an ironic one that well makes sense?2. How is the hearer able to recover the concealed message?The two-way processes (production and interpretation) are within the scope of our study.Our key theoretical goal is to make a search for a workable account for the vexing issue of why this seemingly abnormal way of speaking can well make sense and, above all, this account aims to be natural, palpable and close to our common sense of language. We adopt a qualitative and introspective method in our study backed up by a considerable quantity of data selected from English and Chinese literary works as well as daily conversations. Guided by the principles of cognitive linguistics, the present study emerges from the theoretical framework of MM (Mental Models)-Based Pragmatic Reasoning Hypothesis which, as a dynamic and open system, mainly consists of two organic parts, namely, the Autonomy- Dependency Analytical Framework and the Explicature-Implicature Reasoning Framework, with each being responsible for the account of irony generating and understanding respectively. It is also argued that in the above frameworks it is the relation of proximity that serves as the medium in the deriving process from the Autonomy to the Dependency as well as in the reasoning process from the Explicature to the Implicature.On the basis of the above considerations, some specific guidelines for the present study of irony are conceived. They are:1. The production as well as the interpretation of irony are not analyzed separately at the levels of lexicon and semantics.2. The meaning captured in the process of the interpretation is the specified meaning formed from the integration of the linguistic expression, the intention of the speaker, and the situation in which the expression is conceived.3. The use of irony is actually the result on the part of the speaker in his/her specified production of his/her autonomous intentional content in a certain situation within the continuum of proximity.4. It is also the result on the part of the hearer in his/her analytical thinking in decomposing the specified meaning embedded in the ironical linguistic expression so as to trace back, within the continuum of proximity, the autonomous intentional content of the speaker upon which the linguistic expression of irony is thought to be dependent.An example of irony such as"F is clever."is envisaged to be produced in the following process of deriving with proximity as the medium. And the medium of proximity is envisaged to function in the following way. (/CONF:/ stands for"the constraint(s) under situation F")The same manner might be applied to explaining the process of interpretation of irony on the part of the hearer, but in a reversal order. It is hoped that, with the above description, a production-interpretation mechanism of irony is provided with a workable explanation based on the psychological reality. This tentative mechanism is close to people's common language sense, and attuned to the cognitive hypothesis that there is no inherent distinction between human's cognitive ability and the cognitive principles reflected in language. We hope that this mechanism, apart from offering help, if possible, for people to get a deeper understanding of irony and promoting more worthy researches on irony, will contribute, maybe to a lesser extent, to the exploration of the inner mechanisms of other figures of speech so as to further activate rhetoric study from a cognitive perspective.This paper is incorporated into six chapters.Chapter One, as an introduction to the whole study, delineates a rough picture of our subject matter irony in various facets, i.e., its origin, characterizations, historical development and some modern approaches to irony. This chapter as well sets the tone of the study by presenting our motivation, objectives, methodology and sources of the corpus.The literature review in Chapter Two focuses on demonstrating the most representative new approaches to irony in linguistic fields, ensued by evaluating their merits as well as existing problems. Pondering on the unsolved problems, we bring forth the key research questions at the end of this chapter.After a brief recall of the theoretical background—cognitive linguistics, gestalt theory, Mental Models in line with intentionality, we introduce our theoretical framework MM-Based Pragmatic Reasoning Hypothesis together with two Frameworks in Chapter Three, and envisage four guidelines for the case study of irony.Chapter Four revisits the notion of irony within the cognitive canvas we adopt by scanning its definition, classification, functions, prerequisites and characteristics which set the stage for further exploration of its inner mechanism.Chapter Five is where all our preparations converge on the final findings, namely, the producing and understanding of irony are two cognitive processes. Motivated by intentionality, the speaker fixes on an ironic way to realize the mapping from autonomy to dependency. And the hearer, guided by the speaker's intentionality embodied in initial and boundary conditions, makes the abductive downward reasoning to seek an appropriate positive-negative continuum of proximity centering on a certain category in the Mental Models which overlaps or nearly overlaps with the continuum in the speaker's mind in producing the ironic utterance. A flow chart of irony production and interpretation is built accordingly.In Chapter Six, concluding remarks will be presented to discuss the contributions, merits and limitations of this study as well as the prospect of the follow-up study.