Irony in Selected Articles by Galal Amer

Abstract

This study aims at expressing how irony is discovered and understood in GalalAmer’s verbal utterances. Of concern in this study is to explain how a reader successfully comprehends the speaker’s implied meaning in an ironical verbal utterances. The Relevance Theory has been used to shows how this happens. The researcher collected data by reading a book written by the famous sarcastic writer GalalAmer named the Brevity of Speech and selects the most ironical quotes to be analyzed and illustrates how verbal irony interpreted in these utterances. Two postGricean accounts of irony have been used to express the irony in these utterances. These are the echoic and the pretence accounts. In an echoic account, the speaker does not explain his own thoughts but echoes a thought that he refers to someone else, and simultaneously explains his mocking skeptical or opprobrious attitude to the thought by showing this with saying ironical utterances. According to the pretence account, the speaker of an ironical utterance is not performing a real speech act but pretending to preform it, while expecting his readers to see through the pretence and understand the skeptical, mocking or opprobrious attitude behind it. The researcher groups data according to the source of echoes. Three main sources of echoes were identified. These are echoes of stereotypes, echoes of societal expectations on an individual and echoes of the immediate context. Since various accounts of irony have different ways of finding out the ironic influence in utterances, the researcher detects how each account deals with the different utterances. Some irony is obvious when treated as a case of pretence while another comes out better when treated as an echoic. The echoic account is for instance better appropriate for echoes of stereotypes as well as echoes of societal expectations on an individual. The pretence account is best appropriate for echoes of what has been said previously, in a given context.

Keywords

• grice
• conversational implicature
• relevance theory
• wilson&sperber
• irony
• pretence theory
• galal amer