Psychological aspects of irony understanding

Abstract

We discuss psychological aspects of irony understanding by reviewing some of the experimental research from psycholinguistics. These empirical findings suggest five main conclusions about how people understand irony in discourse: (1) people do not need to recognize irony to comprehend what speakers mean by their use of ironic statements, (2) understanding irony does not require that people see these statements as violating norms of cooperative communication, (3) people can easily understand sarcasm without any special intonational cues, (4) people find statements to be especially ironic that allude to or echo societal norms or expectations, and (5) people can understand statements as being ironic because of the situation even though speakers do not intend their utterances to be understood as irony. Theoretical models of irony should be capable of accounting for these aspects of how people understand ironic language and situations.