Abstract
This paper makes reference to Brown and Levinson's Politeness Theory, and their treatment of irony as an off record strategy. These authors consider that different off record strategies violate or flout different maxims, and "being ironic" is labelled as a strategy violating the Quality Maxim. The main aim of this paper is to discuss how, by being ironic, a speaker or writer can flout not only the Maxim of Quality but the other three Gricean Maxims as well.
Highlights
This work is part of a major study on the phenomenon of verbal irony, which tries to clarify the concept and to look at it from a pragmatic point of view
Leech includes irony as a second-order principie depending on the Principie of Politeness, and he refers to the possibility of violation of the Quantity Maxim by ironic speakers, he does not go deeper as far as this issue is concerned
It is obvious that when going off record and in a great number of instances in which the speaker chooses verbal irony as a strategy he does not avoid obscurity and ambiguity
Summary
This work is part of a major study on the phenomenon of verbal irony, which tries to clarify the concept and to look at it from a pragmatic point of view. Leech includes irony as a second-order principie depending on the Principie of Politeness, and he refers to the possibility of violation of the Quantity Maxim (not the Quality one) by ironic speakers, he does not go deeper as far as this issue is concerned. In this particular paper I study such verbal irony in the light of Politeness Theory, as presented by Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson in their book Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage (1978). The hypothesis put forward is implicit in a paper in which I refer to the co-occurrence of the different off record strategies to convey ironic meanings (Alba Juez, "Irony and Other Off Record Strategies")
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