ირონიის სოციო-პრაგმატიკული ფუნქცია სოციალურ მედიაში (ინგლისურ და ქართულ მასალაზე დაყრდნობით)

Irony is a complex linguistic and social phenomenon. It is an effective rhetorical device that exerts a profound emotional impact on its audience. Through irony, a speaker subtly expresses their position and conveys critical evaluations and attitudes. The success of irony largely depends on the situational context in which it arises, the listener’s intellectual capacity to decode it accurately, audio-visual paralinguistic expressions, and the socio-cultural context. This study presents a novel qualitative and quantitative analysis of ironic discourse in social media, employing comparative analysis within the theoretical framework of socio-pragmatic studies of irony and semantics.
The study's empirical material consists of 36 examples, manifested through 16 verbal (16 English and Georgian Facebook statuses), 14 photographic (only English-language cases collected from a media persona’s Instagram blog), and 6 video-based examples (3 English and 3 Georgian Instagram reels, extracted from American and Georgian sitcoms—"Friends” and “In The Middle of the City”), along with 52 comments.
The relevance of this dissertation is determined by its contribution as a comprehensive study of verbal, pictorial, and video graphics irony on social networks. It thoroughly examines the social functions of irony, the role of shared background knowledge in the decoding process, the significance of digital, audio, and visual paralinguistics, and its impact on users' communication. The primary objective of this study is to identify the types of irony present in Instagram and Facebook discourse, analyze its pragmatic aspects and factors that contribute to its success in virtual communication, determine the role of audio-visual paralinguistics and its variations in Georgian and English-language examples, and explore the social functions of irony, the importance of digital paralinguistics, and users' motivations for employing irony in online communication.
The theoretical significance of the dissertation lies in its comprehensive analysis of irony’s conceptual framework and interpretation. This ensures a deeper understanding of its decoding process within the socio-pragmatic domain. The study is grounded in modern linguistic theories, contributing to the advancement of irony research.
The practical significance of the thesis is reflected in its potential application in stylistics, text analysis, and translation theories, making it a valuable resource for comparative linguistic studies.