FACTORS IN THE FORMATION OF AN IRONIC CONTEXT

The article is devoted to the study of the phenomenon of irony in the psycholinguistic aspect. Ironic discourse is one of the most difficult to study and understand, since the very definition of irony as a hidden, implicit form of communicative influence implies the preservation of a programmed duality of potential perception. The aim of the research is to understand the factors that generate an ironic context in the consciousness of the Creator of irony and the consciousness of its recipient. The psycholinguistic theory of speech generation and perception pushes us to the need to understand the presence of two independent processes that form an ironic context: the formation of an ironic context in speech generation due to the implementation of the author’s ironic intention and the formation of an ironic context in the recipient’s mind in the process of speech perception and recreation of the meanings embedded in it by the author. As a hypothesis it was suggested that, first, for the generation and perception of ironic context, the Creator and the recipient of irony must have certain common characteristics and, secondly, that the factors that form an ironic context, are primarily associated with the characteristics of the individual communicating entities, not the features of the communicative situation itself. To confirm the hypothesis, a series of experiments was conducted, including the diagnosis of the subjects’ personality by various parameters and indicators (preliminary stage) and the analysis of the perception and evaluation by these subjects of texts of various origins containing irony (main stage). The stimulus material was fragments of Russian classical works (novels by L. N. Tolstoy, short stories by A. P. Chekhov, works by A. S. Pushkin, etc.), modern fantasy novels (M. Frai, V. Sverzhin, H. van Zaychik, etc.), Internet memes and fragments of everyday discourse communication containing irony. About 200 students and teachers of educational institutions of Moscow took part in the study as subjects (the majority of them, about 150 subjects, were first or secondyear students of philological and non-philological training profiles; among the rest of the participants were teachers of Moscow universities, schoolchildren and teachers of Russian language and literature of Moscow high schools). The results of the experiment confirmed the hypothesis that the personal characteristics of participants in ironic communication are related to the ability to recognize, maintain and form an ironic context. The key features were the degree of formation of communicative competence, the level of development of critical thinking and skills of analyzing text material. The connection of the ability to perceive irony with the intellectual development.