An Analysis of Discourse and Cognition in Ironic Expression ‘管+他’
MYOUNGSUK JUNG · Chinese Language Education and Research · 2024
This paper analyzes ‘管+personal pronoun’. ‘irony’ from a discourse cognitive perspective. ‘管+他(=不管)’, which is the opposition between the surface meaning and the underlying meaning, is irony. Unlike Korean or English, ‘管+他’ in modern Chinese realizes ‘linguistic irony’ in terms of syntactic structure. However, in order to understand the subjectivity of the speaker’s attitude, position, and emotion, ‘situational irony’ must also be considered. Since irony appears only when there is a presupposed utterance situation, ‘管+他’ is always located in the center or conclusion of a conversation. In order to concretize the views of Chinese scholars who regard ‘管+他’ as a ‘discourse marker’ created by grammaticalization, this paper conducted its research by tracing the five contents covered in ‘The Process of Change in Subjectivation’ by Traugott(1995). ‘管’ and ‘他’ have strong ‘bondedness’ and function as ‘clitization’, a ‘grammatical binding device’ in the text, to bind various parts of the entire discourse. In addition, they gradually become abstract and pragmatic and function as a speaker-centered function. As the situation is viewed from an egocentric perspective, the text gradually changes into a subjective meaning and the speaker as the subject. In other words, it means that the situation and the speaker are closely related. The most interesting point in this paper is the content on ‘epistemic modality’ and ‘figure’ and ‘ground’. Based on pragmatic premises, ‘epistemic modality’ related to deduction and inference was studied. As a result of studying three contents in total for deductive argument, ‘grounds, therefore conclusion’, ‘conclusion, because grounds’, and ‘grounds(reasons)’, it was found that in deductive argument, since the speaker takes the lead in the premise, the speaker’s intention is the most important, and no matter how wrong the argument is, in deductive argument, only ‘unfairness’ or ‘unsoundness’ exist, and all deductive arguments are acceptable. It is also interesting that novelists use the expression ‘管+他’ to induce the reader to ‘perceptual act’ referred to as ‘foreground’ and ‘background’.