A Study Of The Prcognition Process Of Verbal Irony In Communication

Verbal irony, as a language phenomenon, has been frequently used, either consciously or unconsciously, in our daily life. In the past several decades, many linguists have done a great amount of researches on irony from the perspective of pragmatics and cognitive linguistics, among which those researches from the perspectives of Grice’s Cooperative Principle and Sperber and Wilson’s Relevance Theory are the most influential. This thesis, using Conceptual Blending Theory as theoretical framework, first explicates the imperfections of previous researches, and then presents a new illustration of verbal irony recognition process.This thesis is divided into five chapters. The first chapter is an introduction, introducing the research background, research question, methodology and research significance. The second chapter is a literature review of previous researches on verbal irony. The third chapter introduces the theoretical framework of the present study-the conceptual blending theory. The fourth chapter is the main body of the thesis, performing a detailed study of the recognition process of verbal irony, including the function of context as expectation spaces, space clash as the triggering mechanism, evaluation criterion in the selective process and the core concept in the space verification process. Besides, a tentative study of some examples of verbal irony with special features is done for future research. The fifth chapter is conclusion, in which the major findings, limitations and suggestions for future research are illustrated.