PRAGMATICS AND SEMANTICS OF IRONY IN LITERARY DISCOURSE OF POSTMODERN
Abstract
https://doi.org/10.18522/1995-0640-2025-4-67-75
Abstract. The article examines irony, realized in artistic postmodernist discourse, in the pragmasemantic aspect. In the texts of S.D. Dovlatov's stories of the 1970s-1990s, linguistic markers of irony are identified, as a result of which it is determined that postmodernist irony is not exclusively a trope formed and functioning within a lexical combination or a single statement. Irony becomes contextual, representing a text-forming strategy, setting the coordinates of the polyvariability of text interpretation. The semantics of irony is based on the implicitness of meanings, but at the same time it retains the possibility of correct decoding by the addressee. The linguistic mechanisms of irony - contextual use of lexical units and lexical combinations, the result of which is the generation of conflicting meanings, language play with grammatical forms and syntactic constructions, the destruction of stable connections of components of phraseological combinations and syntactic models - are oriented towards a pragmatic impact on the reader, however, the author’s communicative strategy is oriented not towards the search for truth, but towards exposing rationality and attempting to prove the decentering of the world as such.
Key words: pragmatics, semantics, contextual irony, literary discourse, postmodernism, S. Dovlatov
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Copyright (c) 2025 Maria I. Kudryavtseva, Zhinaida V. Rezhuk
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