A pragmatic study on verbal irony in Spanish.

摘要

In my dissertation I present the deficiencies of the traditional Pragmatic models of irony as well as propose a model that contains aspects of irony that have to be considered. Even though these aspects I consider are present in the traditional theories of verbal irony, there is not a single theory that encompasses them all.;The model I propose consists of eight hypotheses that I test in three different kinds of data. The first one is a group of 20 ironies obtained from real conversations. The second is a group of 22 ironies taken from 60 hours of radio recording. The last group consists of 10 ironies from a transcribed conversation among a group of friends.;Also, I propose that any good model of irony has to take into consideration the popular or "folk" uses of the term. For that I analyze 287 instances of uses of the terms: irony, ironical and ironically in their Spanish version as they appear in a Spanish newspaper over a period of six months. The analysis of these data is a first attempt to approach the topic and it is mostly descriptive.;From the conversational ironies, I can say that in order to understand irony and its uses we must take into account the fact that the participants in the conversation have to share background knowledge , a key element in the comprehension of these utterances. If this element is not present, the listener can see if there are any cues (like changes in intonation) signaling the irony. If he does not find any cues he can process the literal version of the utterance. Also ironies are, but not always and not necessarily accompanied by, an answer from the listener. The ironist must have the intention of being ironic. Without this intention there is no irony. I propose too that irony is used to criticize, often in a humorous manner, and that the ironies allude to failed norms or expectations. My last proposal is that the ironic speaker uses pretense with his utterance.;All of these proposals have been tested and proven with my data. The 2 hypotheses with the highest percentage of occurrence were the processing of literal meaning and the presence of pretense.;I also present a vision of irony as a very broad concept that can be conceptualized as a continuum from cases that are very clear to cases that are not so clear.