Attribute Enforcement - Association Model Of Irony Generation And Interpretation

Irony, as a pervasive daily language phenomenon, is seen almost everywhere in our life. It has been studied by rhetoricians and scholars for centuries since the ancient Greek and Rome times. They make descriptive or prescriptive explanations of various facets of irony in order to provide better understanding of irony as a figure of speech. However, this mysterious language phenomenon, where the real meaning goes opposite to its literal meaning when the speaker expresses himself/herself in an ironic way, involves not only the figural part. Modern linguists, especially the pragmatists and cognitive linguists, have been making further efforts in researching this phenomenon from linguistic perspectives and they have proposed many different approaches, such as Grice's pragmatic theory of irony, Leech's Irony Principle, Giora's Graded Salience Theory, Clark and Gerrig's Pretense Theory, Sperber and Wilson's Echoic Mention Theory, and so on. Among these theories, the most acceptable one is Sperber and Wilson's Echoic Mention Theory, but it still has its shortcomings as it doesn't make clear how the recognition of irony works in the framework of relevance theory. Moreover, as some scholars have pointed out, not all ironies can be regarded as mentioned above. None of them can account fully for the use of irony.This paper intends to provide a tentative explorations for the use of irony from a cognitive pragmatic perspective, and after a systematic study of the previous theories and related works, and guided by the principle of cognitive linguistics, we find the attribute enforcement-association model (邹春玲,2010) provides a new perspective and offers great insight for the study of irony. It boils down the linguistic phenomenon into its essence by exploring the attributes of an utterance. Examining the concept of irony, we find that"oppositeness"is its essential attribute which can be best explained by the positive-negative continuum of proximity, one of the dimensions of stereotypical relation. While stereotypical relation together with the laws of gestalt theory are the basis for the conventionality built between attributes, and they are the operational foundation for the enforcement-association which is applied to perceive things as a whole. So, based on the above observation, we built our mechanism of the use of irony within the theoretical framework of attribute enforcement-association model.The definitions of attribute, together with its specific properties, the constancy and conventionality, as well as its function of empathy, determine the operational steps for the attribute enforcement– association model. In the case study of irony, it can be generalized as: the literal meaning and intended meaning of irony have a stereotypical relation along the dimension of proximity. Then in order to interpret the ironic utterance, the hearer conducts the process of induction– enforcement– re-induction consciously, and through the conceptualization of blended generic spaces, he/she reaches the final interpretation of the ironic utterance.This study is divided into six parts to make a systematic research of irony within the attribute enforcement-association model. Part one makes a brief introduction of irony concerning its definition, function and classification. Meanwhile, the author states her research questions, methodology, and the source of data in this section too. Part two layouts the theoretical background of our study: the cognitive-pragmatics, specifically gestalt theory, Mental Models and stereotypical relation and Conceptual Integration theory and briefly reviews the previous studies of irony from various perspectives, stating their merits and pointing out their shortness, which lays the foundation for the proposal of this study. Part three restates the method used in this paper in more detailed way, explaining the abductive method. Part four expounds on the frameworks of Attribute Enforcement-Association Model in depth. And with a clear chart in mind, the author builds a dynamic mechanism for the use of irony within this model and narrows down the study of irony into its generation and interpretation process. Part five applies this attribute enforcement-association model to analyze the generation and interpretation of specific examples the author collected from various sources. At last, this study arrives at a conclusion in part six, which summarizes the contributions and applications of our findings, at the same time, the author also points out its limitations and the prospect of further study.