A corpus-based research of Chinese verbal irony

Abstract

Irony has been on the minds of researchers for decades as a rhetorical device that is heavily reliant on context. Researchers can always find fresh points to research on ironies because of their deep-seated meanings and intended ambiguity. In the past, most scholars believed that "contradiction" or "incongruity" was the most important aspect of irony. We confirm that the true nature of irony is "reversal" in this thesis, which is supported by several examples from practice. The term "reversal" comes from the psychological area and refers to the psychological process that people go through when they flip from one psychological state to the other. We believe that the ability to activate this switch is a necessary requirement for an irony to exist. There are eight types of reversals utilized in ironic expressions, as well as several assistance ways to check the expressions' ironic tendencies. Although irony is a phenomenon that is extremely dependent on the subjective motivations of speakers/writers and the subjective feelings of listeners/readers, we still need a standardized way to identify it from other expressions in order to do study on it. As a result, in this thesis, we propose the Irony Identification Procedure (IIP). The basic phases of this method are not overly complicated, making it simple to comprehend for those without a linguistic background. However, because we specify the particular rules for each stage, we may be confident that the expressions recovered by this approach are typical ironies. Meanwhile, irony, as a linguistic phenomenon that is used as a pragmatic device, is frequently thought to be difficult to detect using established rules such as lexical or grammatical elements. However, we suggest that, while all expressions may have ironic potentials that can be activated by specific contexts, phrases that contain specific constructions are considerably more likely to be ironic than expressions that do not. From large-scale corpora, more than fifty structures are found that are extremely likely to include ironic intentions. The thesis examines each one separately. Finally, we create a Chinese Irony Corpus, which consists of 949 items. All of the items were culled from large-scale corpora including language content from a variety of fields. Each thing is annotated with the ironic sections, ironic level, reversal devices, and emotions. We also compare the of different reversal devices by rephrasing each reversal portion of each item. The corpus provides ample resources for our research, and the quantified "influences" may be useful in future automatic detection studies.