On the Ways of Creating Structural Irony in English Literary Discourse

Abstract

The concept of structural irony is traditionally associated with an implication of alternate or reversed meaning that pervades a work. A major technique for sustaining structural irony is the use of a naïve protagonist or unreliable narrator who continually interprets events and intentions in ways that the author signals are mistaken [1, 45].This paper sets out to investigate structural irony as the organizational principle in English literary discourse. After a survey of different views of structural irony, an attempt is made to verify that the pragmalinguistic techniques, viz. the play on double meaning, echoic mentioning of the word or phrase, the use of emphatic structures in free indirect speech, and repetition of patterns of behavior, are employed in constructing structural irony. The results of the analysis conducted on the material of short stories and novels of English-speaking authors will be presented in order to demonstrate that structural irony can be constructed by combining various linguistic devices to achieve the ironic effect.