the perception of irony in newspaper articles in english and ukrainian

181 Pages·2011·1.97 MB·English

THE PERCEPTION OF
IRONY IN NEWSPAPER
ARTICLES IN ENGLISH
AND UKRAINIAN

Yulia Rosolovska
Master Dissertation
Tutor: Dr. Marta Carretero
Departamento de Filología Inglesa I
Facultad de Filología
Universidad Complutense de Madrid
June 2, 2011
“Trusting no man as his friend, he could not recognize
his enemy when the latter actually appeared.”

The Scarlett Letter –

Nathaniel Hawthorne

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I would like to express gratitude to those who made it possible and who helped me with
the thesis and its completion. Thus, first of all, I would like to express recognition to all
of the teachers of the Master course of English Linguistics of the Complutense
University of Madrid, who dedicated their time to teach and to motivate us in doing this
course. Moreover, particular gratitude goes to teachers Dr. Begoña Nuñez Perucha and
Dr. Emma Dafouz Milne, who were of great help during the whole course, providing
helpful information and recommendations.
Second, special appreciation and thankfulness go to my tutor Dr. Marta Carretero for
her constant dedication to me and comprehension as well as for her availability and
valuable advices.
Moreover, I am very grateful to all of the classmates and teachers from the Complutense
University of Madrid of the Faculty of English Philology who actively contributed to
my research by filling in the questionnaires, giving advice, sharing their impressions
and putting great interest into the study.
To conclude I would like to say that without the help of those persons I would not have
been able to complete this research, for what I am very grateful.

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Abstract

This paper sets forth a contrastive analysis of irony in 60 newspaper articles extracted
from two journals written in English, The New York Times and The Guardian, and the
Ukrainian newspaper Ykraincka Prabda, all published in March 2011. The point of
departure will be a prototype approach to irony, according to which it has a high degree
of overlap with neighbouring categories such as metaphor, sarcasm or humour. Irony
will not be considered to involve violation of Gricean maxims, but flouting instead,
since its use is due to the writer’s intention to communicate additional meanings rather
than to provoke communication problems. The paper will offer a classification of
different linguistic devices that express irony (Barbe, 1995, Beals 1995, Booth 1975,
Kreuz and Glucksberg, 1989 and Stanel 2006), which may be basically divided
between: a) clausal devices, such as reversed polarity (i.e. negation instead of
affirmation or vice versa), metaphors, rhetorical questions, exaggerations and
unexpected speech acts, and b) lexical devices such as reinforcing expressions (sure(ly),
it is clear / natural…), antonyms or homonyms as well as oxymorons and polysemy.
The articles, whose topics are politics, economy and society (life and style, sports,
entertainment and culture), were analyzed in terms of irony and then distributed among
60 informants, aged 18-55 of different nationalities and with education at university
level. The informants, after reading the articles, filled in a questionnaire with tasks
about rating the degree of irony of the articles as a whole, detecting concrete
expressions of irony and explaining them by means of non-ironical paraphrases. The
responses to the questionnaires were inserted in a database for quantitative analysis,
whose results are discussed: among other issues, the articles in Ykraincka Prabda
display a remarkably higher degree of irony than those of the other two newspapers, and
age plays a crucial role in understanding irony. The article also aims to shed light into
the degree of correspondence between different theoretical studies (Barbe 1995;
Muecke 1970, 1980; Stanel 2006) and the layperson’s idea of irony, in order to redefine
the concept and scope of irony for application to further studies.

Keywords: irony, newspaper articles, English-Ukrainian contrastive analysis,
questionnaire, informants.

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Index:
1. Introduction……………………………………………………………………………….3-8
1.1 Research questions and structure of the paper ……………………………………...3-5
1.2 Introduction to irony………………………………………………………………...5-6
1.3 Newspaper language structure……………………………………………………....6-8
2. The method……………………………………………………………………………...9-12
2.1 The newspaper articles…………………………………………………………...…9-10
2.2 Participants………………………………………………………………………...10-11
2.3 Questionnaire……………………………………………………………………...11-12
2.4 Methodology………………………………………………………………………….12
3. Theoretical background………………………………………………………………...13-51
3. 1 What is irony? ........................................................................................................13-34
3. 1. 1 Irony definition………………………………………………….13-15
3.1.2 Characteristics of irony…………………………………………..15-21
3. 1. 3Irony functions ………………………………………………….21-24
3. 1. 4 Is irony the same as metaphor, lie, sarcasm or humor? ...............24-34
3.2 Irony classification………………………………………………………………..35- 41
3. 3 Recognition of irony…………………………………………………………….. 42-49
3.4 The approach to irony in this study……………………………………………….49-51
4. Results and discussion…………………………………………………………………51-85
4.1 Irony perception in American, British and Ukrainian newspaper articles………...51-59
4.2 Irony classification ………………………………………………………………..59-68
4.3 How do we recognize irony? …………………………………………………….68- 83
4.4 Age differences……………………………………………………………………83-85

5. Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………..85-88
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Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………..89-90
Appendix A: Questionnaires ………………………………………………………….81-96
Appendix B: Newspaper articles …………………………………………………....97-177

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1. INTRODUCTION
1. 1 RESEARCH QUESTIONS/HYPOTHESIS
In the last decades, the study of irony has played an important role in linguistics, and
especially in pragmatics, with a focus on the analysis of the purposes and intentions of
irony use in both written and oral texts, as well as its identification by the addressees
(Muecke, 1980; Barbe, 1995; Stanel, 2006). On the one hand, Muecke‘s (1980: 64- 92)
study on irony is the first of these and his classification of irony into verbal, dramatic and
situational marked a starting point for other contemporary linguists, such as Littman and
Mey (1991: 131- 151) or Kreuz and Glucksberg (1989: 374- 386), who provide a more
detailed taxonomy of irony usage. On the other hand, Barbe (1995: 18- 24) highlights the
importance of more pragmatic issues of irony such as the meaning, speaker purpose and
addressees, whom she denominates victims1. Other pragmatic approaches on irony have
been done by Grice (1975: 9-113) and Lapp (1992) in Stanel (2006: 33- 34) 2, where irony
is perceived as a substitute of conversational implicature and as a simulation of insincerity,
respectively. Similarly, Clyne (1974) and Löffler (1975) in Stanel (2006: 40- 44) explain
several semantic signals of irony, such as the usage of rhetorical questions and polysemy,
which might help in the process of irony identification in both written and oral contexts. A
more general overview of the irony markers is presented by Hutcheon (1995: 156), who
argues that irony markers do not signal irony by themselves, but their function in context
suggests that words/sentences might be ironic. Therefore, the five categories of signals that

1 This concept is also used in a similar way by Muecke (1980:30)
2 Clyne (1974), Löffler (1975), Berg (1976) and Lapp (1992) are the four German linguists mentioned in this
paper, whose researches are not available in English; therefore, Stanel’s (2006) comments on their theories
are taken into account.
Stanel (2006) also comments on other references on metaphor by German linguists, such as Clyne (1974),
Löffler (1975) and Berg (1976).
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function structurally are: various changes of register, exaggeration, contradiction,
simplification and repetition.
Nevertheless, although considerable research has been devoted to irony in written texts,
less attention has been paid to irony in newspapers. Thus, the reason for studying irony in
newspapers is in order to find the answers to the following questions: How do people
perceive irony in newspapers in their daily life? Are people actually aware of the fact that
certain irony markers exist and thus help them to identify irony? If so, to what extent do
these ―irony alarms‖ serve as an aid when trying to comprehend irony? Is it possible to
classify irony into ironic statements and ironic situations in the newspapers? In what
newspapers (i.e. Ukrainian, British or American) does irony predominate? Finally, what
are the ―markers‖ of irony that predominate in the three newspapers?
Therefore, this paper aims, first of all, to analyze irony in American, British and
Ukrainian newspapers, particularly its perception by the readers and, secondly, to compare
the results achieved using a quantitative analysis. In addition, the identification of irony
signals presented by Clyne (1974), Löffler (1975), Barbe (1995), Beals (1995) and Willer
and Groeben (1980) will be analyzed in detail in order to observe their efficiency in written
texts. Besides, some plausible results on irony predominance in American, British or
Ukrainian newspaper articles will be presented.
The remainder of this paper will be divided into four sections: methodology, theoretical
background section, results and discussion and conclusion. In the methodology section the
information concerning the necessary data and the process of the investigation of irony
perception will be provided. In the theoretical background section a broad scope of the
linguistic study of irony from the last four decades till the present time will be offered and
the approach adopted here will be specified. Subsequently, in the results and discussion
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section, the analysis of irony in American, British and Ukrainian newspapers will be
supplied, focusing on the identification of irony by the participants of the study. Besides,
this section also offers a discussion of possible differences between irony predominance in
the American, British or Ukrainian newspaper articles. Finally, the conclusion section
contains the summary of the main points and the results achieved from the study.
1. 2 INTRODUCTION TO IRONY
Irony has gained an important role in all branches of linguistics in the last decades, though
its roots can be traced back to Aristotelian times, when it had a quite negative meaning
(Gibbs and Izett, 1994, Sperber and Wilson, 1995: 240). As irony meaning evolved
throughout an extended period of time, it has gained different meanings which lead to a
certain controversy regarding the actual idea of what irony is. Thus, on the one hand, its
meaning has lost the negative effect of the classical philosophers on people and achieved
another - ―saying contrary of what one means‖ (Muecke, 1980 in Pishbin, 2010:3),
indicating that the utterance, if taken literally, is inappropriate to the situation and,
therefore, the recipient is compelled to reinterpret it in such a way as to render it
appropriate; therefore, the most appropriate way ―to interpret it is meaning the opposite of
its literal form‖ (Searle, 1979: 113 in Hutcheon, 1995: 62). Thus, speech act theorists such
as Searle (1979) considered that what people called ―ironic‖ was somehow related to the
logical contradiction to what was said or to the literal meaning (Hutcheon, 1995: 62). On
the other hand, there are theorists such as Hutcheon (1995) and Levinson (1983), who
claim that irony is something more than a mere relationship between the said and the
unsaid; irony conveys an attitude or a feeling from both the interpreter and the ironist
(Hutcheon, 1995: 37- 39) and it may be perceived as a perlocutionary act (in Hutcheon,
1995: 39), introduced by Austin (1975. 101). This means that the ironic utterance ―brings
about certain consequential effects upon the feelings, thoughts, or actions of the audience,
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or of the speaker, or of other persons‖ (Levinson, 1983: 236). Thus, irony can be viewed as
the expressive tool that the ironist uses in certain situations, which might be perceived
either negatively or positively by the interpreter.
Therefore, irony is not easily definable and its features and classification vary from one
author to another. For instance, while some linguists (Muecke, 1980; Booth, 1975)
consider that irony is not equally understood by all people, who have a choice to accept it
or not, or there might be also dangers in earnestness, ―in not having a sense of irony‖
(Muecke, 1969: 245 in Hutcheon, 1995: 44), others, such as Gibbs (1991: 523- 530) and
Stanel (2006), assure that nearly everybody is capable of irony understanding, even though
sometimes this understanding is unconscious or it completely rests in the interpreter
(Hutcheon, 1995: 45). Overall, there are many situations in which irony is not easily
perceived, due to the context (Smith, 1989: 73) in Hutcheon (1995: 143), and/or the
intentions of the ironist (Grice, 1975; Austin 1975, Searle, 1983) and this may cause
problems of misunderstanding between participants in both spoken and written registers.
1. 3 NEWSPAPER LANGUAGE AND STRUCTURE
Newspaper language belongs to the written text and, therefore, works on a visual or
graphological level, whereas oral text consists on aural or phonological level. However,
both texts have lexical and grammatical or syntactic levels (Reah, 1998: 55 in Stanel, 2006:
52). Moreover, Crystal and Davy (1969) in Stanel (2006: 52) claim that there is a
difference between the journalese and normal English. Thus, the two theorists found out
that verbs of speaking often appear before the subject in the statement- type sentences as in
―said Dr. Mason‖ instead of ―Dr. Mason said‖ in the journalese English. Furthermore, they
also emphasize the frequent presence of adverbials in empathetic clause initial position
instead of post-verbal positions and a great number of complex post- and premodifications
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