Ironiaa vai ei? Tekstin merkityksestä ja sen tutkimisesta

• Toini Rahtu

Avainsanat: ironia, tekstintutkimus

Abstrakti

Irony or not? The meaning of texts and conducting research in this field (englanti)

2/2000 (104)

Toini Rahtu (address: Suursuontie 1, FIN-00630 Helsinki)

IRONY OR NOT? The meaning of texts and conducting research in this field

The article considers the question of whether certain passages of a text or the text as a whole can be interpreted as conveying irony. The aim is to formulate generalisations about the creation of textual meaning. Irony is restricted here to the intentional use of multiple interpretation to present in a concealed manner some (facetious) criticism targeted at something or someone. The method used is to analyse people's interpretations of an example text, as only interpretation will reveal whether the irony has been conveyed to the reader or not. The writer compares her own views with the interpretation of the text by test readers and thus obtains a diverse picture of the influence of text-internal and text-external contexts on interpretation.

The non-literal nature of irony can be conveyed either as modal irony (attitudes, expression of interpersonal relations) or propositional irony (concerning the predicate or a reference). The text passage may convey irony in context: regressive ironizing cotext has its impact backwards in the text, whereas progressive ironizing cotext has a forward impact. There is also reflexive irony, with its impact on the passage itself. The impact of ironizing cotext is based on coherence: if the reader is to interpret a text as coherent or meaningful, he or she must interpret as conveying irony those sections which, if taken literally, would cause incoherence in the text. Coherence also has an influence in a text-external context: the reader searches for coherence in relation to his or her own cultural and cognitive expectations, text conventions, the source of the text, etc. Thus the expectation of irony facilitates the process of interpreting it. Expectation explains the understanding of irony better than the Sperber and Wilson 'echo' theory: it explains why some expressions - sometimes echoic, sometimes non-echoic - are interpreted as conveying irony, and some not.

The effect of expectation on the interpretation of irony varies. The interpretation of unique, situational irony is based largely on the fact that the literal expectation is not fulfilled. The interpretation of conventional irony - for example parody or satire - indicates, on the other hand, that indirectness is expected in these types of text. This questions the Gricean explanation that the interpretation of indirectness is always based on the expectation of literal language use. There is a continuum between completely expected and completely unexpected irony, on which irony is coded in different ways and to different degrees.