Irony

Abstract

There are different types of irony, including situational irony, dramatic irony, cosmic irony, and Socratic irony. From a linguistic point of view, we are interested in what is called “verbal irony”: irony communicated via language. Verbal irony has been traditionally analyzed from a rhetoric or stylistic standpoint. In the last decades of the 20th century, the field of pragmatics opened a new and thriving path for the analysis of ironic communication. From a pragmatic standpoint, ironic utterances are a pretty interesting phenomenon, as it seems that the speaker’s meaning is very different from (or even contradictory to) the literal meaning of the utterance. Explaining why and how we communicate ironically is a challenge for every pragmatic theory. There are many different accounts that study ironic communication from a pragmatic perspective; Grice’s view, the echoic account, and the pretense theories are probably the main and most influential. Much has been said about irony in this field, but there are still many open debates about the basic elements of ironic communication: the importance of attitude expression and the asymmetry issue; the role of the speaker’s cues in irony recognition; the relationship between irony and sarcasm, on the one hand, and irony and humor, on the other; and so on and so forth. This article was written with the institutional support of the Basque Government (IT1032-16) and Grant PID2019-106078GB-I00 funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033.