Author’s name:
Valentina A. Tyryguina, Vera V. Nikiforova – Linguistics University of Nizhny Novgorod, Nizhny Novgorod, Russia
Abstract:
The article examines the phenomenon of indirect communication, understood as a meaning-rich form of interaction in which the interpretation of an utterance involves meanings that are not explicitly verbalized. One manifestation of indirect communication is ironic praise. In such speech acts, praise goes beyond its traditional interpretation as an exclusively positive evaluative statement and functions as a mitigating device that softens or masks negative evaluation. The paper focuses on the mechanisms underlying ironic praise as a complex speech act that combines two heterogeneous phenomena, praise and irony, and simultaneously realizes two logically incompatible semantic planes: praise and criticism. The relevance of studying ironic praise is linked to the growing interest in modern linguistics in the actual use of language in discourse. The study demonstrates that the transition from the linguistic meaning of utterance components to their contextualized speech sense requires active interpretive effort on the part of the addressee. The aim of the study is to provide a linguistic description of praise in indirect communication by identifying its structural, semantic, lexical, stylistic, and pragmatic features. The object of the research is the expression of praise in acts of indirect communication, while the subject comprises the lexical, grammatical, semantic, communicative, and pragmatic char-acteristics of ironic praise. The research material is drawn from the autobiographical novel My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Malcolm Durrell. The investigation employs a comprehensive method-ological framework, including syntactic, lexical, semantic, pragmatic, contextual, and sociolinguistic analysis, which allows the phenomenon of ironic praise to be examined in its entirety. The results of the study offer a detailed description of the mechanism responsible for generating the implicature underlying ironic praise. It is shown that the essence of an ironic utterance lies in the simultaneous coexistence and interaction of two semantic planes: explicit and implicit. On the explicit level, the axiological potential of the subject and object of irony is evaluated, with the object being formally presented as preferred. On the implicit level, however, a corrective reinterpretation takes place that establishes the subject’s evaluative superiority.
| Section | LANGUAGE AND CULTURE |
| DOI: | 10.47388/2072-3490/lunn2025-72-4-75-90 |
| Downloads | 2614 |
| Key words | indirect communication; praise; irony; intention; plan of expression; plan of content; implicature |