On verbal and situational irony

Abstract

This chapter treats the notion of ironic echo as subsidiary to the broader notion of epistemic scenario, which applies to both verbal and situational irony. In verbal irony, the existence of an epistemic scenario takes the shape of a pretended agreement with someone’s beliefs, which can be materialized in agreement expressions of various kinds including echoic mentions. In situational irony, the epistemic scenario is built on a generally reliable assumption about a state of affairs. Finally, situational irony can be embedded within a communicative context, an observation which allows for a classification of ironic types that overrides the traditional verbal irony-situational irony dichotomy. The resulting account provides a single unified framework for the study of irony.