A Study Of Verbal Irony In Downton Abbey From The Perspective Of Adaptation Theory

As a ubiquitous phenomenon in daily conversation,irony has been widely investigated from different perspectives,ranging from rhetoric,literacy,psychology to pragmatics.However,fewer studies on irony are conducted systematically from the perspective of psychology and cognition owing to their complexity and variance,so there is an urgent need to probe into psychological and cognitive processes involved in the generation of ironic utterances in distinct settings.Adaptation Theory,which involves cultural,social and cognitive considerations in linguistic field,provides a comprehensive framework for the interpretation of how irony comes into being.Therefore,based on Adaptation Theory,this study attempts to explore the form traits of verbal irony in general and elucidate the psychological process of how interlocutors bring about verbal irony.Fifty-two episodes of Downton Abbey has been watched,transcribed and analyzed carefully.Three hundred and sixty-five examples of verbal irony has been collected in the light of criterion of identification of irony proposed by Yao(2008)and then classified into different categories from the perspective of contextual correlate adaptation and structural object adaptation with the help of following.research questions.Contextual correlate adaptation consists of social world adaptation and mental world adaptation and structural object adaptation is composed of lexical,syntactic,rhetorical and pragmatic forms in accordance with pragmatic-linguistic cues of irony raised by Yao(2008).This study has also discussed dynamics of adaptability as well as individual and social salience of how interlocutors bring about verbal irony.Three research questions are addressed in this study:(1)What is the general distribution of verbal irony in each season?(2)What are the distributions of adaptation to the contextual correlates of irony in terms of social world and mental world?And what are types and frequencies of structural objects in verbal irony?(3)How does verbal irony represent dynamics of adaptability and salience of the adaptability?Analysis of the data in this study indicates that:(1)Verbal irony is widely used in conversation of the characters in this TV series and the distribution is closely related to the development of events in plots;(2)As for adaptation to contextual correlates involving mental world and social world,adaptation to speakers’ emotions occupies the highest percentage of the ironic utterances,while unequal power distance,the lowest.In addition,rhetorical questions in rhetorical cues are the main structural objects of adaptability and superlative degree in lexical cues is least adopted;(3)The process of verbal irony is dynamic in terms of individual salience involving expectation as well as social salience with asymmetry.The present study widens the scope of the application of Adaptation Theory and supports the application of adaptation framework on pragmatics that is conducive to interpreting verbal irony based on ironic conversations.However,due to limited data source and knowledge of the researcher,adaptation framework cannot entirely explain verbal irony.It is expected that a more complete picture of theoretical framework contributing to verbal irony can be depicted if more reliable data in further studies of verbal irony are involved.