A Pragmatic Study Of Responses To Verbal Irony From The Perspective Of Linguistic Adaptation Theory

Though irony has been widely explored in various fields such as philosophy,literature and pragmatics and achieved great success, studies on responses to verbalirony are surprisingly rare, which arouses our interest.Based on Linguistic Adaptation Theory proposed by Verschueren (2000), thepresent study concentrates on revealing the pragmatic strategies adopted by speakersto respond to verbal irony and pragmatic functions actualized by responses. Bothquantitative and qualitative methods are employed and the business-themed datainvolved in this study are collected from the Tiger Talk of Phoenix TV, which is one ofthe most influential programs.According to the data and the form of expression which includes verbalcommunication and non-verbal communication, the author generalizes pragmaticstrategies into two broad types, verbal response and non-verbal response. Amongthem, verbal response is composed of retaliating, correcting, objecting, objecting+correcting, pretending agreement and ignoring and changing the topic. whilenon-verbal response covers keeping silent and smile.Another part explores the factors affecting the responses. The contextualcorrelates of adaptability which involve adaptation to the social world and to themental world are considered in this paper. To adapt to the social world, utterers areexpected to take social norms and power relation into consideration. For adaptation tothe mental world, emotions and motivations are taken into consideration.Lastly, the pragmatic functions of responses to verbal irony include persuadingthe other side, improving interpersonal relationship and creating sarcastic effects.The findings of this study are presumably applicable and valuable to theparticipants and viewers of TV talk shows. On the one hand, hosts can not only learnfrom the pragmatic strategies to react to verbal irony occurred in the shows, but figure out the factors affecting the choice of strategies and pragmatic functions thatresponses to verbal irony can actualize as well, which altogether contribute to theimprovement of the quality of TV talk shows. On the other hand, the audience andhonored guests of these TV talks shows can have a better understanding of what isgoing on in the program. Moreover, this pragmatic study is expected to deepen theunderstanding of the relations between language and society.