基于概念整合理论的反语认知理解研究

Chapter One Introduction 

1.1 Background of the Study
Irony, a common phenomenon, which is easily found at all levels of language. And it is considered to be a technique of using incongruity to show the difference between reality and expectations by saying one thing  and  meaning  another.  The  irony  in  some  speeches,  in  everyday  life,  is  often  used  in  spite  of  being unconscious about it. For instance, a very thin boy is called “fatty” and a very fat man is called “skinny”. And in the same way, the utterance “well, how clever you are!” may often be said and that maybe means the  addressee  is  not  clever  but  stupid.  And  these  examples  are  just  as  Kierkegaard  (1966)  claims  that  no authentic human life is possible without irony.   From  time  immemorial,  being  an  alluring  phenomenon  for  many  a  scholar  and  researcher,  the  irony has been researched from a variety of aspects in many different approaches. When it comes to traditional rhetoric  and  literature,  irony  is  taken  as  a  figure  of  speech  which  is  the  remarkable  feature  of  the  works written  by  Jonathan  Swift,  William  Shakespeare,  Thomas  Hardy,  Mark  Twain,  Jane  Austen,  and  the  like. And in their works, irony has always been considered to be a type of ornaments in order to make their own speech  or  writing  more  powerful  and  persuasive.  These  attempts,  nevertheless,  cannot  explain  what  the irony really is and how it is produced. And it is nice to see that a great number of scholars and researchers, including linguists and psychologists, have been doing some studies to answer these questions over the past decades, which has predicatively made a great contribution to have a better understanding of the full extent of the irony. And among them one of the most famous is Grice?s Conversational Implicature (1975) which tries  to  see  irony,  metaphor  and  hyperbole  as  an  intentional  violation  to  produce  special  conversational implicature.  And  then  with  the  advent  and  development  of  cognitive  linguistics  in  1980s,  the  cognitive mechanism  of  irony has paid much attention to by some linguists, including Sperber &Wilson?s Echoic Mention Theory (1981) and Utsumi?s Implicit Display Theory (2000). Although these theories can account for the recognition and understanding of irony, they cannot completely explain the dynamic online meaning construction of irony. And Fauconnier put forward Conceptual Blending Theory in the 1990s on the basis of “Mental Space”, which depends on some new perspectives to explain the establishment of cognitive model and the mechanism of meaning generating. And the thesis will analyze the ironic utterances in Pride and  Prejudice  with  the  help  of  Conceptual  Blending  Theory,  w hich  is  an  online  dynamic  cognitive mechanism in order to show the construction process of ironic real-time sense. 
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