The Adaptation-Relevance Approach To Irony In Verbal Communication

As an intelligent and witty language phenomenon, irony exists in every corner of life, playing a decisive role in human's daily communication. Irony can be classified into three kinds, among which verbal irony is the most common and brilliant form. This paper aims at studying verbal irony, called "irony" for short in the following part. Irony is defined as conveying original meaning by the opposite or different utterances of what is said. Its significance and universality have drawn more and more scholars' concern. They try to explain this phenomenon from rhetorical, psycholinguistic, pragmatic approaches and so on. Regardless of their achievements, previous studies still fail to achieve satisfying effects. The essential process of irony use remains to be explored further.Cognitive linguist proposes the adaptation-relevance theory based on the integration of merits of the relevance theory of Sperber & Wilson and the adaptation theory of Verschuren. This theory is applied to interpreting many language phenomena in virtue of its strong explanatory and descriptive force. This paper tentatively employs this theory to analyze irony in verbal communication, aiming at further exploring the essential process of the production and interpretation of irony and thus providing a new approach and reference to irony.The main body of this paper has applied the adaptation-relevance theory to analyzing the collected instances of irony with the qualitative and ducumentary methods and essentially displayed irony as a dynamic process of adapting to various contexts and making constant choices on the basis of the optimal relevance to people. Besides, it has elaborated that irony use is also a process of strategy-choosing in detail, namely, praising in order to blame; blaming in order to praise; pretending agreement with the victim; fallacious reasoning; displaying the incompatibility; pretending self-censure. In virtue of the above analysis, this paper is not only beneficial for people to catch the real process of irony use but also more deeply understand the motivations of irony intending to achieve and the reasons of irony occurring frequently.