LINGUIST List 24.361
Mon Jan 21 2013
Diss: Cognitive Science/ Discourse Analysis/ Philosophy of Language/ Pragmatics: Kapogianni: ' Irony and the Literal Versus Nonliteral Distinction...'
Editor for this issue: Lili Xia
<lxialinguistlist.org>
Date: 21-Jan-2013
From: Eleni Kapogianni <kapogiane322
yahoo.co.uk>
Subject: Irony and the Literal Versus Nonliteral Distinction: A typological approach with focus on ironic implicature strength
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Institution: Cambridge University
Program: PhD in Linguistics
Dissertation Status: Completed
Degree Date: 2012
Author: Eleni Kapogianni
Dissertation Title: Irony and the Literal Versus Nonliteral Distinction: A typological approach with focus on ironic implicature strength
Linguistic Field(s):
Cognitive Science
Discourse Analysis
Philosophy of Language
Pragmatics
Semantics
Dissertation Director:
Napoleon Katsos
Katarzyna M. Jaszczolt
Dissertation Abstract:
This thesis approaches the phenomenon of verbal irony from a definitional andtypological perspective, with the aim of detecting the principal factors that affectthe derivation and strength of ironic meaning.
A preliminary step for this analysis is the treatment of the definitional problem ofverbal irony, achieved through the postulation of a set of necessary and jointlysufficient conditions for the presence of the phenomenon. Subsequently, withevidence from the study of a wide array of irony strategies, two main types of thephenomenon are distinguished on the basis of the relationship between theexpressed and the intended meaning of the ironic utterance. The proposed ironytypes are examined in relation to different factors that may affect the strength ofthe ironic implicature, i.e. the level of confidence of the hearers about an ironicinterpretation of the utterance and the difficulty by which the speaker can cancel(in the Gricean notion of explicit cancellability – Grice 1975) this interpretation.Five main factors are examined both theoretically and experimentally: derivationsyllogism, necessary assumptions, context dependence, co-textualreinforcement, and the use of discourse frameworks (particularly thehumorous/ironic framework).
The results of this examination show that the influence of different factors ofstrength on the derivation of the two main irony types and their subtypescorrelates with the observation of significant differences in (ironic) implicaturestrength. These results lead to the consideration of factors of implicature strengthas a helpful means of categorisation of inferential meaning, which cuts acrossthe literal-nonliteral divide, being able to provide distinctions within levels ofmeaning that had so far been considered rather unified.
Page Updated: 21-Jan-2013