ON SITUATIONAL IRONY IN ENGLISH LITERARY DISCOURSE

Abstract

The relevance of the study is due to the insufficient development of the issues associated with the analysis of situational irony. In the present study, the objective of the study is to identify the linguistic features of the ironical mode of literary discourse in accordance with the idea of situational irony as mode of literary discourse. In accordance with this goal, the work sets the following tasks: 1) to consider approaches to the analysis of situational irony in modern linguistics; 2) to explore the characteristic features of ironic situations; 3) to consider the types of situational irony in English short stories. The analysis of language material is carried out by means of genre approach, pragmalinguistic and stylistic methods of research. In this study, the principle of organizing a short story is based on the classification of events by J. Lucariello, which represents 7 types of ironical script. The principle of organizing a story is based on a certain discrepancy of an ironical script with the generally accepted script. The classification of ironical events by J. Lucariello, therefore, can rather be called the classification of violations or deviations. Ironic schemes are activated when some combination of the following four characteristics is found in a situation: unexpectedness, human frailty, outcome, and opposition.The analysis of the material showed that the imbalances script is most frequently used, viz. such subtypes as temporal, contextual imbalances and role reversal. The stories abound in emotional lexis, lexical repetition, syntactic parallelism and indirect politeness strategies. They are designed to create an ironic effect, thereby involving the reader in the dialogue with the author. In addition, by way of situational irony the writer conveys a certain moral message to the reader. These linguistic features of short stories characterize them as a sample of the ironical mode of literary discourse.