| Irony is a kind of common as well as special language phenomenon, no matter in daily communication or literal works, irony is used unconsciously. For a long time in history, researches towards irony are constrained in the field of rhetoric, viewing irony as a kind of trope. In recent years, studies on irony have already expanded into many subjects such as psychology, philosophy, linguistics, etc., and a lot of achievements have been reached. But all these researches are restricted in semantic comprehension and interpretation strategies of irony; so there is still limitation in the studies from the perspective of pragmatics and cognition. This thesis tries to study irony from the core theory in pragmatics and cognition—relevance theory by Sperber & Wilson and blending theory by Fauconnier. Through a series of analysis, the thesis points out that the essence of irony is to find the optimal relevance between the speakers and hearers, and also, the complicated process of irony generation and comprehension are analyzed in details.This thesis first casts a reviewing glance at the vast literature of irony study, which, roughly speaking, may be boiled down into two categories: the first is the traditional accounts of irony, insisting that irony expresses the opposite of what is literally said, with Grice as the representative of this group; the second category covers most of the recent studies, the opinions of which towards irony are radically different from those of the traditional accounts. The influential ones include Sperber and Wilson's mention theory, Clark and Gerrig's pretense theory, etc., among which Sperber and Wilson's theory is one of the earliest that deals with irony from a cognitive perspective and attracts most attention from researchers of irony. In its later development, their theory is covered within the framework of relevance theory and undergoes some revision, which sheds some fresh light on the study of irony.After the literature review, the thesis gives a brief introduction to relevance theory. Relevance theory is developed on the revision of Grice's Cooperative Principle; it provides some theoretical basis for human verbal communication. Concerning the study of human communication, relevance theory rejects the traditional code model and proposes an ostensive-inferential model instead, according to which, communication is a process during which the communicator is involved in ostension and the audience is involved in inference. All the verbal communication is carried out under the guidance of the relevance principle, which consists of two parts: the cognitive principle and the communicative principle. Every act of ostensive communication communicates a presumption of its own optimal relevance which is also the essence of irony.A large space of the thesis is devoted to the discussion of the relevance theory's point of view on irony from three aspects: (1) the essence of irony from the perspective of relevance theory; (2) the function of irony. With regard to relevance theory, irony is perceived as an echoic interpretive use of language in which the communicator dissociates herself from the opinion echoed with accompanying ridicule or scorn. The speaker's attitude to the opinion echoed is one of rejection or dissociation. Thus, relevance is achieved.Based on the research of precedent scholars, this thesis tries to analyze the internal cognitive processes of irony generation and comprehension in a relatively deep meticulous way in chapter three. In irony generation, the speaker, driven by some certain motives but constrained by some contextual factors, produces ironical utterances by blending that involves a complex four-space blend. In irony comprehension, mental spaces are built up in part by recruiting structures from both conceptual domains and contextual information. The participants in irony comprehension build up incompatible mental spaces by recruiting structures from the same conceptual domains. Through partial cross-space mappings, each kind of conceptual structure is projected onto the blended space and reconstructed. The blending creates the emergent structure, which represents the completion of the on-line ironical meaning construction. Hence, the participants can understand the ironical meaning. Moreover, the factors of participants in an utterance and the contextual factors are indispensable in the processes of irony generation and comprehension. |
