The irony in media social: The speech act perspective

Abstract

Irony conveys a meaning that is contrary to what is spoken by speakers. Nowadays, irony has become a trend of figures of speech among social media users to comment, to critique or to advise on an issue on social media. Thus, this study aims to examine irony in social media from the speech acts perspective which based on the taxonomic criteria proposed by Searle (1976) namely assertive, directive, commissive, expressive and declarative. This study employs the content analysis method by drawing upon samples of ‘status posting’ from the Amrans Fans Facebook page by specifying the status of the page uploaded. The Amrans Fans Facebook page was chosen, as this Facebook page is frequently uploading the status of ironic in displaying various current issues. The result shows the structure of irony in Malay consists of three participants namely ironist, observer and the target for the irony. The findings also showed that in Malay language, ironic speech acts are delivered in the form of assertive, commissive, expressive and directive. The finding also indicated that the ironic act is the same as the non-ironic, which is to have input and output conditions, propositional contents, preparatory condition, sincerity condition and essential condition. Obviously, an ironic act is considered to be a strategy of utterance by the Amrans Fans Facebook to attract his followers.