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영어

This paper pursues devising a Relevance-Theoretic account of practicing irony as a speaker’s discourse strategy for reinforcing social intimacy between interlocutors in communication. In general, irony has been regarded as a case of rhetorical figure, which conveys something opposite of what was literally said (see Van Enschot, Hoeken and Van Mulken 2006). With reference to the essence of irony, Sperber and Wilson (1995: 239) hold that “the attitude expressed by an ironical utterance is invariably of the rejecting or disapproving kind.” Including Sperber and Wilson (1981, 1995), in fact, most antecedent pragmatic accounts of irony use have focused on only its sarcastic purpose, which aims to ridicule or blame other’s mistakes and faults. As pointed out in Barbe (1995), Jorgensen (1996), and Culpeper (1996, 2011), however, irony can often be used as non-sarcastic purposes: what is called genteel irony. According to them, when genteel irony is used among close friends, peers or colleagues, it can strengthen their social intimacy and solidarity, instead of insulting or ridiculing each other. Although Sperber and Wilson’s (1981, 1995) previous approaches to irony, which view its nature as ‘echoic mentioning + rejection or dissociation,’ have concentrated their interest on explaining irony of sarcastic purpose, unlike them, I examine how irony can work as a discourse strategy for increasing social intimacy within the same principle of relevance. My approach is, therefore, to make a contribution to the theoretical expandability of Relevance Theory (henceforth RT), in that it verifies that even irony of non-sarcastic purpose can also be treated by a single principle of relevance within the same RT framework.