On the English Verbal Irony.doc

On the English Verbal Irony I. Introduction My particular interest in irony was triggered by an oversimplification that is characteristic of all the energy expended at home by many a student in the English rhetoric field in trying to present us with an adequate account of the English irony. While quite a few of these endeavors turned out but a manifestation of a combination of a more or less idiosyncratic taxonomy of irony with the few much-too-repeated, hence trite examples, most of the endeavor-makers saved themselves trouble enough by identifying and equating the English irony with the Chinese irony without any significant distinctions made between them. Consequently, we are very likely to be biased towards thinking of the two as one and the same, notwithstanding we are confronted with the various Chinese terminologies (eg. fanyu, fanfeng, jifeng, fengci etc.) by which the Chinese scholars choose to call “irony”. “The English irony and the Chinese irony are similar to each other in terms of either type or function or use. With recourse to an antithetical use of lexical meaning, both of them say the contrary of what one thinks or of what one would have ones interlocutor think”. (胡曙中1992:353) However the traditional analysis of English irony as literally saying one thing and figuratively meaning the opposite has long before been challenged by many Western scholars, and if the notion of irony in English were of that uniformity, the Chinese irony would conform to its English counterpart perfectly well and all the theoretical contentions on irony would have made no sense at all. J. A. Cuddon (1997), in his Dictionary of Literary Terms, devoted much space to ironys historical evolution from a simple rhetorical trope to the present notion of a promiscuously complex character, and the conclusion he reached is, “but it seems to be the essential nature of irony (the need to use the word seems rather than it is is a product of the inherent ambiguousness of the whole concept) that it eludes definition.”(Cuddon, 1997:338). Yet in spite of the difficulty that almost every researcher of irony will certainly encounter in attempting or being tempted to define irony in such a way that the definition would encompass all the instances of irony, and that by it irony would be clearly distinguished from non-irony, it is still possible to characterize by one of its essential semantic features, viz, semantic discrepancy or incongruity, as is pointed out by Cuddon: “however, it seems fairly clear that most forms of irony involve the perception or awareness of a discrepancy or incongruity between words and their meaning, or between actions and their results, or between appearance and reality. In all cases, there may be an element of the absurd or the paradoxical.” (ibid.) This semantic discrepancy featuring the English irony evidently differs from the semantic feature of binary opposition in the Chinese irony, the former being a much broader concept than the latter. It would be more accurate and appropriate to address the Chinese irony, being a figure of speech, as the English antiphrasis, which is more in accord with the Chinese irony, meaning the use of a word or a phrase to convey an idea exactly opposite to its real significance and being a subcategory of the English irony. Antiphrases in English form what may be called standard verbal irony, which is regarded by many English irony investigators as a primitive type of irony, irony in its simplest and crudest form. As a general topic, however, irony “has been tackled in the West by scholars in fields as diverse as linguistics and political science, sociology and history, aesthetics and religion, philosophy and rhetoric, psychology and anthropology. Irony has been located and explicated in literature, the visual arts, music, dance, theatre, museum displays, conversation, philosophical argumentation, and the list could go on and on.” (Hutcheon, 1994: 1) “Irony attends us everywhere-. No mere figure of speech, irony is central to all thought, for the use of language as such is essentially ironic.” (E. Gans, 1997: 64) This sharp awareness in the West of ironys ubiquity has given rise to much discussion and contention on irony from a variety of perspectives, and as a result, the notion of irony has been developed there into one of multiplicity and diversity. In Muecke (1970: 18-36), we have a sketchy account of this development. Irony both in its verbal form and in its situational form is spotted in such classical literary works as Odyssey and Beowulf (That I mentioned these two epics does not necessitate the point that it is in these epics that irony made its debut). But it is at a much later date (at the dawn of the 18th century) that the word “irony” came into wide use. Initially, irony was chiefly seen and employed as a rhetorical trope (verbal irony). But ever since the end of the 18th century, various aspects of irony have been claimed and the notion of irony much expanded: situational irony with dramatic irony and irony of events included; Socratic irony; general irony with its alternative names of World Irony, Cosmic Irony, Philosophical Irony and Irony of Fate; and romantic irony. So there has occurred quite a shift over time from seeing irony as a limited classical rhetorical trope to treating it as “a keystone of poetics, a paradigm of criticism, a mode of consciousness or existence that raises questions about the self and the nature of knowledge, a philosophical stance vis-a-vis the universe, and informing principle of personality, or a way of life.” ( Hutcheon, 1994:3) Nevertheless, none of these issues beyond the linguistic field is to be undertaken in this thesis, whose aims and focuses are much more modest: to present a critical review of some of the major linguistic approaches to verbal irony, irony in verbal discourses ( in literary writing as well as in common speech), thereby to pave the way for a pragmatic and cognitive analysis of how and why irony comes about. Why should you want to use this strange mode of discourse where you say something you dont actually mean and expect people to understand not only what you actually do mean but also your attitude towards it? How do you decide if an utterance is ironic? In other words, what triggers you to decide that what you heard (or read) is not meaningful alone, but requires supplementing with a different, inferred meaning (and judgement) that would then lead you to call it “irony”? These are the questions to which I shall come out with some likely answers. It has been noted that there have been frequent denials of the possibility of theorizing irony, as will also be demonstrated in the next section because irony, inviting topic as it looks, has proved to be an intricate and intractable business indeed. And admiring those who have not been too much daunted to tread into this potential quagmire, I also rush into it to join them, wishing that the effort that I shall exert here would not be totally in vain and the little bit that I shall contribute here would be worthwhile.II.Comment on the Traditional Semantic Inversion Theory of Verbal Irony Irony, in Websters New World Dictionary, is explicated as “a method of humorous or subtly sarcastic expression in which the intended meaning of the words used is the direct opposite of their usual sense.” And Quintilian also defines irony in terms of the fact that “we understand something which is the opposite of what is actually said” (Sperber & Wilson, 1981: Note 2). Thus an ironical utterance is traditionally thought to be meaning the opposite. An ironical remark “What lovely weather” would have the figurative meaning “What awful weather”, and an ironical utterance “Hes my fine friend” would figuratively mean “Hes not my fine friend”. Obviously this traditional account of irony is purely from a semantic perspective: it is based on the idea of semantic inversion or propositional negation, a simple antiphrasis which can be understood by a straightforward meaning substitution-a substitution of the real, “ironical” meaning for the “false” literal meaning. Of course, some ironies can be fitted into this semantic theory of irony. But a radically simplified framework, it is far from being universally applicable and a great many ironical cases have to be located outside its range. Such an utterance as “It seems to be raining” made by someone caught in a downpour is as ironic to us as “Lovely weather said in the same situation (this is supposed to be ironical unless, of course, the speaker happens to love rainy weather). In the same vein, if you speak of a friend of yours who has recently divulged your business secret to one of your business opponents not as “a fine friend”, as is regularly said to be ironical, but as “truly naughty”, the ironic overtone is not in the least mitigated. Yet in either case, the speaker, speaking with reservation, deliberately plays down his frustration or anger, and the utterance does not express the opposite of what the speaker thinks but conveys LESS than what it is really the case or what the speaker actually thinks it is the case. This, in the traditional rhetorics, is called “understatement”, which is not untrue in terms of logical truth value. According to the theory of scalar quantity implicature, linguistic items capable of being arranged in terms of informativeness or semantic strength are said to form a Horn scale. That is, the items on the same scale are in a relationship of entailment: sentences using the strong ones entail those using the weak ones. Thus “All boys went to the party” entails “Some of the boys went to the party”, that is, the latter will also be true if the former is true. In the same vein, given that the speaker and the hearer already know that, in the first case (i) it is now raining dogs and cats and in the second (ii) that friend concerned is knavish, then it will not be false to say (i) “It seems to be raining” and (ii) “Hes a naughty friend” on the ground that like the universal and existential quantifiers forming a Horn scale < all, some>, the background information and the uttered proposition also form such a scale: (i) <know, believe > and (ii)< knavish, naughty>, both being valid scales in that the two items in each of them share the presence of one quality. The proven truthfulness of the two understatements under discussion serve to undermine the traditional semantic theory of irony: ironic meaning does not always come into being by way of simply inverting or negating a proposition because irony is not necessarily associated with falsehood and not infrequently a statement can be simultaneously true and ironical. Falsehood is anything but a prerequisite for an utterance to be ironical. This is also true in another way. The person who asks “Did you remember to water the flowers?”(taken from Sperber and Wilson :1981) when caught in a thunderstorm can not mean the opposite of what he says. Indeed it is hard to see what would be the opposite of this question or of most other ironical questions. Similarly, suppose the person betrayed by his friend says something like “Thank him all the same”, then it is equally hard to tell what would be the exact semantic opposite of this utterance since it is a speech act more concerned with expressing an attitude than with conveying propositional content. Besides a restrictiveness in applicability, another problem that besets this traditional semantic theory is that, even within its applicable bounds, it is sometimes hard to locate the irony in any particular one word of a sentence and therefore there is no finding any point at which the sentence can be inverted or negated. This failure has to do with the fact that the theory does not take into account the role of context in attributing and interpreting ironical meaning. A case in point would be Mark Antonys famous line in Shakespeares Julius Caesar: “Brutus is an honorable man”, a line that seems to be ironical unanimously. Now regardless of the determining role of contextual assumptions and simply by the terms of the semantic inversion or logical contradiction theory, that frequently quoted ironical line might justifiably mean “All who are NOT Brutus are honorable men,” and even “Brutus is an honorable woman.” But these are obviously unacceptable choices despite the fact that they involve negation or semantic inversion. The only acceptable one is “Brutus is NOT an honorable man”, but how could the theory manage to exclude the other two possibilities? It seems that the mechanism of this theory for deriving the ironic meaning of a sentence is no more than to go to the opposite, from which difficulties instantly arise: at some times we have no opposite to go to while at others, we have more than one to arrive at. Moreover, this theory fails to explain why ironical utterance “What lovely weather” is preferred to its literal counterpart “What awful weather”, which, on this analysis, means exactly the same thing.III.Comment on Myers Roys Syntactic Approach to Verbal Irony Branching away from but nonetheless rooted in the traditional semantic theory of irony is Myers Roys syntactic approach to irony. According to Myers Roy (1977,1978), irony appears either in the matrix clause or in both the matrix and the dependent clauses, but never just in a dependent clause. In the following examples, the locus of irony is underlined, the asterisk indicates that the underlined dependent clause cannot carry irony and irony over the scope of a sentence is represented in bold-face. Except for (2a), (5) and (5a), all examples are from Myers Roy. (1)* I hate people who signal. (2)I love people who dont signal.According to Myers Roy, (1) cannot have an ironic reading whereas (2) can. That the first utterance is non-ironical is due to the fact that the irony only applies to the dependent clause, which only functions as an incidental comment on a state of affairs, somebody signalling to make a turn in driving as in (1) or some driver cutting off the speaker without signalling in the city traffic as in (2). The negation or opposition of the surface clause, which is what Roy calls “sincere paraphrase”, forms the locus of irony, and (2a) is the sincere paraphrase of (2): (2a) I hate people who dont signal.The sincere paraphrase provides the speaker meaning or the real or underlying thought or intention of the speaker, who has only expressed the sentence meaning, the meaning that is customarily considered independent of context (here dwells some pragmatic consideration over irony of this theory). Consider also the following examples with their “non-ironic” paraphrases. (3)I hate people who signal. (3a) I love people who dont signal. (4)I hate people who signal. (4a)I l