Pragmatic Analysis of Irony:An Adaptation approach

Abstract：By adopting the linguistic adaptation model in particular, irony is pragmatically analyzed as adaptation to the physical, social and mental elements in language use and language interpretation. Meanwhile the adaptation is processed dynamically, and the medium of adaptation is salience.

Key Words：Irony Pragmatic Analysis Adaptation approach

1. Introduction

According to the famous Belgian linguist-Jef Verschueren, every thought, emotion and action is aimed directly or indirectly toward adapting to the environment. In order to reach or approach some positive or negative goals, the communicators choose irony as his communicative means because of its interlinguistic features. Meanwhile, the use of irony can adapt into the preference of social conventions and psychological intentions and consciousness.

2. Linguistic reality of irony

The distinguishing linguistic feature of irony is that the implicated meaning may simply be the opposite of what is said literally. By means of irony, instance of the strategic avoidance of explicitness, the language user approaches his expressive and communicative needs. Consciously or unconsciously, the ironist uses a variety of cues, many of which are called "ironic cues", for assisting in the search for mutuality and the establishment and confirmation of mutuality. Accordingly, the interpreter may recognize the utterer’s ironic intention with the help of the ironic cues. If they cannot find certain cues or signal of irony, they will be bewildered.

2.1 Hyperbole, exaggeration

我告诉您了，根据报纸上官方的介绍，他是天底下头等大好人，浑身上下毫无缺点，连肚脐眼都没有。（宗福先《于无声处》）

The underlying part is both hyperbole and irony; in fact, the implicit meaning is just the opposite; the man referred to is bad enough.

2.2 Interjection

“哇！老张，你这几天春光灿烂啊！”

（老张很开心的样子，转眼回过神来）“好啊！原来你在骂我。”

Zhang thought he was praised being in high spirit, but suddenly he realized he was teased when the TV serial“春光灿烂猪八戒”came to his mind, perhaps the exaggerated injections“哇！”Reminded him of something ironic as well.

2.3 Attitudinal repetition

Mark: You like the cloth?

Len: WHAT A PIECE OF CLOTH!

Mark: What do you think of the cut?

Len: What do I think of the cut? The cut? What a cut! I've never seen such a cut!(H. Pinter, the Dwarfs)

Deliberately repeated, the attitude of condemnation and dissatisfaction is showed between the lines.

2.4 Prosody (paralinguistic cues)

America's allies- always there when THEY NEED YOU.(S.Attardo, 1999)

The ironic meaning is showed by the stressed tone.

In most cases, ironic cues are not restricted to a single utterance or gesture. Instead, they may extend over a couple of lines or utterances and even a whole passage and story. The locus of irony may appear at the beginning, in the middle of or at the end of the story. The famous novel“the Cop and the Anthem” of O’Henry is the last kind.

3．Functions of irony

Communication is no doubt from mind to mind, and we should never forget that mind is "mind in society". The external factors are the social milieu in which communication takes place, and social conditions influence the negotiation of language use. The internal factors are the cognitive mechanisms that communicators possess and enable them to extract information from the communication. Phenomena of ironic meaning would have no function in communication, unless inferencing processes can be relied upon to activate them, in a manner that is sufficiently based on socially shared norms to be negotiable. In the meanwhile of adapting to the social and mental existence, irony offers an effective way of accomplishing various communication functions that are difficult to achieve literally: positive goals (e.g. to be humorous, to emphasize a point, thank, compliment, and easing criticism) and negative goals (e.g. to be sarcastic, to satirize or attack to give pain, to criticize, to enhance condemnation, etc.)

4. Dynamics and irony

In the theory of adaptation, "accounting for the dynamics of adaptability, or studying actual processes of (inter)adaptation, taking into account the full power of variability and negotiability, is the central task of specific pragmatic investigations." (Verschueren, 2000:147)

4.1 Dynamics and temporal dimension

Meaning generation is always dynamic and interactive. Time or temporal dimension provides the raw material for communicative dynamics. Mostly, the ironical effect cannot be recognized immediately when it is utterered. The hearer may even be ill directed and feel perplexed before he/she associates the utterance with information given in later utterances. There is an interval between the production of irony and its interpretation. It is of course a cognitive process which makes the actual meaning clearer than a first glimpse might suggest. Just as Verschueren (2000:148) proposes that it is possible to distinguish stages of adaptation in linguistic interaction. Three types can easily be distinguished: i）linguistic choices may be made after certain circumstances‘in the world’ (as seen by the utterer U and the interpreter I have appeared; ii)linguistic choices may create certain circumstance; iii）choices may remain ineffective until or become ineffective when certain later conditions come into play.

4.2 Dynamics and target

At times, the effect the speaker believes his criticism has sometimes differs from the effect as seen by the target. The dynamic piece of interaction clearly generates meanings that are not directly related to speakers' intentions. That is to say, in every form of human behavior, there is of course intentionality involved, but there is no direct link between the speaker's original illocutionary intention and the illocutionary meaning which her own utterance takes on as a result of the social dynamics generation.

Because of special pragmatic effects of ironic utterance (sometimes sarcastic or aggressive), the speaker should adapt to the familiarity and social relationship between them and different targets' personal characteristics, wishes, states of mind in case of misunderstanding and failure in communication.

4.3 Dynamics and context

Choices, once made, whether on the production or on the interpretation side, can be permanently renegotiated. Whatever is said can be interpreted in many ways. One of the reasons is that choices do not necessarily exclude their alternatives from the world of interpretation. In the same context, the same utterance may have different interpretations. For instance,

What a lovely day! (Context: it is snowing.)

The interpretations can be: if the speaker loves snow, it its not ironic. If he hates snow, it is ironic. If he is going out and must give up as the result of snow, it is ironic. If he has to go out, but he himself does not want to; as the result of snow, he may stay in, it is not ironic.

While in different contexts, the same utterance may have different interpretations. The following examples of the story contexts and the target sentences are presented by Gibbs(1986)

Context A: John and Bill were taking a statistics class together. Before the final exam, they decided to cooperate during the test so they worked out a system and they could secretly share answers. After the exam, John and Bill were really pleased with their cheating system. Later that night, a friend happened to ask them if they ever tried to cheat. John and Bill looked at each other and laughed, and then John said, " I would never be involved in any cheating".

Context B: John and Bill were taking a statistics class together. John was clearly better prepared than Bill. During the exam, Bill panicked and started to copy answers from John. John did not see Bill do this. Later that night, a friend happened to ask them if they ever tried to cheat. John and Bill looked at each other, and then John said, "I would never be involved in any cheating".

In context A, the utterance is ironic because it is the direct opposite of the fact that they are cheating, which is clearly known by the speaker John. And in context B, Bill copied answers from John during the exam, which is not known to John. When John says " I would never be involved in any cheating", he himself thought he just told the truth without any implicit meaning, so in context B, the utterance is not ironic.

5.Degrees of ironicalness

The making of choices in general as well as the contributing mental processes, are subject to different manners of processing. In particular, they can all take place with different degrees of salience. Their operation may be completely conscious or not conscious at all, with every shade in between. All linguistic choice-making implies some degrees of consciousness, irony is of this kind. There exist different degrees of ironicalness as well. With many functions in language use, different degrees of ironicalness have different effects in communication.

5.1 Individual salience: expectation

On the one hand, the utterer's expectation deserves special mention. Only the expectation possessed by utterers can motivate them to use language ironically. When the utterer has no expectation which is identifiable and relevant to the ironic situation, the degree of ironicalness amounts to zero. The utterer approaches or realizes the communicative goals corresponding to his/her expectation in making adaptation.

In normal communication, on the other hand, the interpreter primarily expects an utterance in consistence with the context, but the use of irony turns out to be against or counter his expectation. The interpreter's perception of counter-expectational mismatch as markedness keeps the hearer psychologically on alert and makes him assume that such utterances could not be interpreted along the lines of normal reading. In other words, people judge whether an utterance is ironic and the degree of ironicalness by assessing the distance between the expectation and the utterance. For instance,

A mother asked her son to clean up his messy rooms, but he was lost in a comic book. After a while, the mother discovered that his room was still messy, and said to her son: The room is totally clean!

The scene of messy room dissociates the mother from her expectation of being clean and tidy, so in the form of irony, the mother realizes her expectation or communicative goal of making criticism. From the other angle, the mother's literal complimentary comment is out of the expectation of the son since he is worried about being complained as soon as the mother enters. The counter-expectation mismatch makes the ironic intention clear to him.

5.2 Social salience: asymmetry

Asymmetry is an important feature of irony. It refers to the phenomenon that people normally like to use more positive utterances to ironize negative situation than negative ones to ironize positive situation.

As many studies (e.g. Kreuz and Glucksberg, 1989; Kumon-Nakamura et al., 1995) have pointed out, positive utterances (e.g., this room is clean) are, in general, recognized to be more ironic than negative utterances (e.g., this room is messy). This suggests that the polarity of an utterance plays an important role in assessing the degree of ironicalness. The more frequent, familiar, conventional, or prototypical/stereotypical the information in the mind of the individual or in a certain linguistic community, the more salient it is in that mind or among the community members.

The more frequent choice of positive utterance reflects an adaptation of particular preference for positive cultural norms in social life. It represents the social ideal of seeking for peace, harmony and perfection.

6.Conclusion

From the above pragmatic analysis of irony, we find that the ironic utterance adapts to linguistic reality, social and mental world; the adaptation of irony is processed dynamically in relation to the temporal and contextual dimensions and different targets. In particular, they can all take place with different degrees of personal salience and social salience.

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