Signals of irony in the structure of an author’s ironic discourse in british literary texts

Abstract

The article is devoted to studying the term ironic discource, semiotic processes in it, its structure, regularities, and also the place and role of irony in it. The goal of the work is to study the structure of ironic discource, the connection with the cognitive processes of communicators and to clarify what influences on the adressee’s perception of the message. During the research the next conclusions were made. Ironic discource is connected with cognitive processes in communicators’ consciousness. Extralinguistic information together with the aggregate of language funds infl uence on a adressee’s perception of a message. The adressee’s main task is perception and analysis of the sender’s encrypted ironic message. So, the process of communication is closely connected with semiotics, where a sign is understood as a two-side essence. The addressee pays attention to the outer context, which can contain signs of various complexity(quotes, introduction of a new referent, intertextual connections). Both the contexts are interconnected. In the process of ironic utterance interpretation the addressee relies on the verbal component and on the knowledge of the situation. The smallest semiotic unit of an ironic utterance is an ironic code, which is formed by the sender under the infl uence of the adressee’s expected reaction and extralinguistic factors. The incorrect decoding of the ironic code results in misunderstanding of the implicit meaning of the utterance and the communicative failure. So, semiotic processes and regularities play a great role in the process of communication and in the ironic discource as well. Unverbal components play an important role in the correct decoding of the ironic message by the addressee. The verbal component contains signals of the irony. The results of the research can be used in different disciplines and researches on philology, literaturestudy and linguistics. The methods used during the research are distributive, component, differential, textual analysis, methods of induction and deduction.