earticle

영어

The goal of this paper is to make a pragmatic account of irony used not only as a verbo-pictorial form but also as a visual (i.e. non-verbo pictorial) one in some commercial advertisements. Traditionally, irony has been defined as a type of rhetorical trope, which expresses something opposite of what was actually said (see Van Enschot, Hoeken and Van Mulken 2006). Relating to the nature of irony, Searle (1979: 113) holds that ‘the hearer is compelled to reinterpret it in such a way as to render it appropriate, and the most natural way to interpret it is as meaning the opposite of its literal form.’ However, these viewpoints on irony stay just in the dimension of rhetorical mechanism. Colston and O’Brien (2000) hold that when irony is realised in commercial advertisements where the advertiser guides the consumers to purchase his products or services, it may yield more effects than other figurative mechanisms (e.g., metaphor, metonymy). In this paper, following Relevance Theory (henceforth, RT), which views the nature of irony as ‘echoic mentioning + rejection or dissociation,’ I examine how it is processed and why it is more powerful than literal language in the circumstances of real commercial advertisements. At last, I verify that this approach well explicates the case in which visual irony is used as well as the one in which verbo-pictorial (i.e., multimodal) is shown, employing a single principle of relevance, and this paper contributes to reinforcing the theoretical expandability of RT by proposing more economic way of explaining not only verbo-pictorial but also visual irony.