Irony and proposition: regularities of interaction
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.31548/philolog0(292).2018.0115-124Abstract
The article is devoted to the issue of creation and interpretation of the communicative meaning of ironic assertions. The choice of this type of utterances allows to draw into analysis a parameter of the truth of a propositional content and to carry out an operation of negation on the semantic level. A further advantage of assertive utterances as research objects is high relative frequency of their use in ironic discourse.
The research aims at discovering regularities of the effect of negation on the pragmatic level and suggests a pragmalinguistic description of some types of ironic assertions and their lexical and structural peculiarities. The main research techniques are speech act analysis and analysis of utterance context.
Felicity conditions of assertive acts include the preparatory condition that the speaker has grounds that support the truth and informativeness of the propositional content and the sincerity condition that he believes the proposition he expresses is true and is sure of its ability to bring in new information. An ironic sense arises when the speaker intentionally violates the felicity conditions supposing that the addressee will discern the purpose of this violation.
The concept of negation must be broadened to embrace not only the propositional act, but also the act of intentional violation of pragmatic rules which changes the character of a speech act. The ironic speaker’s incorrect manipulation with the felicity conditions of a speech act may be described as their indirect negation affecting the pragmatic level of meaning.
It is found that for the majority of ironic assertions pragmatic negation is accompanied by propositional negation while some of them, though truthful in content, involve the speaker’s violation of the informativeness criterion for asserting. Two special types of noncategorical ironic assertions which generate hedges for negation on both propositional and pragmatic levels are distinguished: the act of intentional understatement and the act of supposition. The cases in which the process of interpretation of an ironic utterance results in the meaning opposite to its direct meaning seems to represent the most trivial kind of irony.
The research shows that the interpretation of ironic utterances is only an approximation to the author’s meaning, because a real act of ironic communication comprises indirect meaning only. However, this fact does not contradict the viability of carrying out an interpretation procedure which takes into account the direct meaning of an utterance, the speaker’s adherence to pragmatic rules, as well as similitude of the information potentials and value paradigms of the communicants.
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