A PRAGMATIC STUDY OF IRONY IN POLITICAL ELECTORAL SPEECHES

This paper deals with irony in electoral political speeches from pragmatic point of view represented by two American candidates: Barack Obama and George W. Bush. It has set itself to deal with this issue in particular because it has not been given due attention It falls in five sections; section one is an introduction, section two provides a literature review on irony, section three is to develop a model for ironic analysis, section four is about the analysis of the data, and section five sums up the conclusions. The paper attempts to investigate ironic strategies, stages, the possibility of understanding irony from the speaker's illocutionary force, and explicating the gradualness of the ironic insincerity where insufficient contextual clues exist. To achieve such aims, a model is developed for the analysis of irony in political electoral speeches. The findings of the analysis verify the hypotheses represented by the process of ironic stages, strategies, ironic insincerity of the speaker, and irony is an ostensible speech act. On the contrary, it rejects the hypothesis of not conveying irony where insufficient contextual clues exist.