A Study Of Verbal Irony In Obama’s WHCD Speeches Based On Conceptual Blending Theory

The word irony originated from the Greek word “eironeia”,and then evolved into a common language phenomenon in human communication with being widely used in both written and spoken language,which has drawn attention of scholars from different fields since ancient times.The study of irony extends from the earliest rhetoric to the fields of philosophy,literature,linguistics and so on.Different branches of modern linguistics examine the language phenomenon from various angles,including the concept of irony,the generation and understanding mechanism of irony and so on.However,due to the complexity of irony and the defects of the above studies,they can not give a systematic and comprehensive explanation for the process of dynamic meaning construction of irony.Based on the perspective of conceptual integration theory,this thesis selects research data from American ex-president Obama’s speech to analyze the cognitive process of ironic discourse,and explore in dynamic study.On the basis of the previous studies,the thesis summarized the characteristics of verbal irony.Among them,the characteristic of incompatibility,which refers to the conflicts between inferences from contextual sources and the propositional information of the utterance,plays a key role in the recognition of irony.Therefore,the Yus’ contextual activation model,which is formed on the foundation of relevance theory,will be applied for recognizing the ironic discourse within former US President Obama’s speeches in the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner from 2009 to 2016,so as to complete the necessary work of data collection,and provide a prerequisite for late on case analysis,which is about the cognitive process of ironic recognition and comprehension.The thesis is divided into five chapters.Chapter one generally demonstrates the background information related with the present research.In chapter two the author makes a literature review of the major approaches related with irony from the different angles.Yus’ model for irony comprehension will also be introduced in this part.Then chapter three will be concerned with the research methodology,including the introduction of the framework of conceptual blending theory and the application of Yus’ model.Being as the most significant part,chapter four will mainly focus on the exploration of ironic utterances from the speeches delivered by former US president Obama in WHCD,within the framework of conceptual blending theory.Four types of blending networks will be applied into probing the dynamic cognitive process of ironic meaning construction.Chapter five will give a summary of the present research.Through the analysis of some typical cases within the corpus of Obama’s speeches in the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner,the study illustrates the strong explanatory power of conceptual blending theory for the online meaning construction of the ironic utterance in the political speech,which is an innovative expansion of the theory itself.Meanwhile,it provides a starting point for the cognitive mechanism of irony.Secondly,by applying the theory into speech language analysis,we can find the advantages and disadvantages of the theory,which is helpful to the further development of the theory.