Toward A Cognitive Study Of Irony Based On RT-CIT Model

Irony is a pervasive language phenomenon with distinctive charm. It is not only seen as arhetorical device, but also a genre of communicative strategy. For example, the speaker said:“What a lovely day for a picnic” on a rainy and blustery day. It is not only a simple rhetoricaldevice, but also the speaker’s negative intention in positive words, that is, we had better nothave a picnic today.For a long time in history, researches towards irony are constrained in the field ofrhetoric, and later extended gradually to psychology and linguistics. Unfortunately, thesestudies mainly deal with the disputation of its rhetoric, structure, and pragmatic functions andso on. In order to make a deep interpretation of irony, some studies conducted by linguists hitupon the cognitive mechanism of irony with inspiring theories, such as relevance theory (RT)and conceptual integration theory (CIT). RT and CIT respectively aim to identify the meaningconstruction and regard it as the dynamic inferential process of cognition. However, relevancetheory, as a general guiding principle for communication, does not reveal the inner dynamicmechanism of meaning construction in cognition. Conceptual integration theory makes up thisdrawback by the mapping and projection among different spaces, but it is lack of a generalguiding principle. Therefore, it is possible and necessary to combine RT and CIT.Based on the previous study of combining relevance theory and conceptual integrationtheory, this thesis attempts to put forward a revised RT-CIT model, for the purpose ofrevealing the cognitive mechanism of irony, that is, under the guidance of relevance, theaudience selects the optimal relevance from cognitive context which is stimulated by themanifest information in utterance space and the optimal relevance expectation appears.Through cross-space mapping and selective projection, the belief space of hearer’s optimalrelevance expectation is in contrast with the reality space of input spaces, and the space conflict occurs with the failure of projection, which triggers the hearer’s associative ability bycontrast. Then the hearer has to shift and build up a new space which is contradictory to thebelief space but corresponds to the reality space, and the hearer has to go back to the linguisticcontext or the extra-linguistic context to check whether the new space can work efficiently ornot. After the check space, the irony interpretation is finished, and the ironic intention isgotten.This thesis has certain implications with respect to the interpretation of irony both intheoretical and practical perspectives. From the theoretical perspective, the research mightgive certain enlightenment to the study of cognitive linguistics by proposing the revisedRT-CIT model to interpret irony. Practically speaking, a study is conducted in which therevised RT-CIT model is used to analyze some ironic utterances of Zhou Libo, which makespeople immediately grasp the ironist’s real intention.