A Study Of Verbal Irony In Political Debates

Irony is a kind of rhetorical device and an expressive means of language. Verbal irony is a form of non-literal language in which speakers communicate implied propositions that are intentionally contradictory to the propositions contained in the words or sentences themselves. Recently, linguists mainly focus on the following two aspects of verbal irony. On the one hand, they concentrate on the semantic meaning and pragmatic function of verbal irony. On the other hand, they conduct researches on the rhetorical effects of verbal irony in literary works. However, most of the linguistic data they use are intuition-based data, unsystematic or isolated data, which makes it difficult to examine the pragmatic effects of verbal irony in real talking environment.The present thesis uses the theories (turn-taking, adjacency pairs, and sequences), proposed by Sacks and Schegloff as the theoretical framework. Through a quantitative and a qualitative analysis of the three presidential debates between Senator Obama and Senator McCain in2008, this thesis attempts to find the features of irony sequences in political debates and provide basis for identifying irony sequences in conversation. Moreover, this thesis also attempts to interpret verbal irony based on adaptation theory and face theory.First of all, the author of this thesis identified the irony sequences through the meaning expressed by the debaters as well as the tone, facial expression and gestures, etc. Then, the author used transcription symbols to transcribe the irony sequences. In the end, the irony sequences were classified and counted respectively according to their pragmatic functions. Major finding are as follows:1)the pragmatic functions of verbal irony in political debates are either used as defense strategy or as attack strategy.2) Statistics show that the number of occurrences of verbal irony as attack strategy is significantly larger than that of verbal irony as defense strategy. Therefore, in the political debates, attacking the opponent is the most important pragmatic function.3) Through the conversational analysis of the irony sequences, it is found that verbal irony as defense strategy tends to occur after a critical comment or a question proposed by the opponent, while the places of verbal irony as attack strategy are more flexible. They can occur at the very beginning of the turn or in the middle of the turn.4) Statistics show that the number of verbal irony as defense strategy occurring after a critical comment is significantly larger than that occurring after a question, and the number of verbal irony as attack strategy occurring in the middle of the turn is larger than that at the beginning of the turn. Thus, verbal irony as defense strategy occurs mainly after a critical comment while verbal irony as attack strategy occurs mainly in the middle of the turn.5) Finally, we further interpret irony from the perspective of pragmatics. On the one hand, verbal irony can be seen as a product of adaptation; On the other hand, due to the ambiguity of verbal irony, the hearer tends to interpret verbal irony in the direction of benefiting him/herself and saving the positive face. Therefore, irony is used as a way to strengthen the positive face.At the end of the paper, the author also has pointed out the limitations of the study and offered some suggestions to the future research. Considering the cultural difference between the debaters and the author of this study, the comprehension of verbal irony in this thesis may not be thorough enough. And in the future, research focus can shift to the comparison of the features of verbal irony between political debates and daily conversation.