According to Routledge Dictionary of Language and Linguistics (Bussmann 1996: 596), irony is defined as ‘a rhetorical trope: the replacement of an expression that is meant by its opposite’. In relation to the nature of irony, however, Colston and O’Brien (2000) hold that when irony is used in advertisements in which the advertiser persuades the viewers to do what he wants, it brings about bigger effects than other linguistic mechanisms (e.g., metaphor). The purpose of this paper is to examine and explicate the nature of irony, which is a type of figurative language, on the basis of a single pragmatic principle of relevance, which holds that ‘every act of inferential communication communicates a presumption of its own optimal relevance’ (Sperber and Wilson 1995: 260). Furthermore, I explain how irony is interpreted within the boundary of the same principle. For doing this task, I analyse and examine the language presented in several real cases of commercial advertisements (especially in America), in which irony occurs. With reference to this work, I treat visual irony as well, which has no verbal cue.. According to RT (e.g.,, Sperber and Wilson 1995), the principle of relevance is to be applied to every case of communication without any exception. If so, it should also be possible for the case of visual irony to be explained by the RT framework. By verifying that the principle of relevance successfully encompasses explaining even visual irony without any verbal stimuli, this paper makes a contribution to not only pursuing more economic account of interpreting both verbal and visual irony but also strengthening explanatory expandability of RT..
저자
Dae-Young Kim [ Gyeongnam National University of Science and Technology ]
