6 - Clues of Irony

Summary

A major risk is associated with being ironic: a hearer who does not recognize the speaker’s irony will believe that the speaker has committed herself to the literal meaning of the utterance –and this meaning is normally rather different or even contradictory to what the speaker actually intends to communicate. Common knowledge and contextual information help the hearer recognize the speaker’s ironic intention but, to avoid misunderstandings, ironic speakers can resort to using clues. Some of these clues have been traditionally studied in the pragmatics of irony –the speaker’s tone of voice, stylistic choices, word ordering, etc. The speaker can use these to alert the hearer that her words should be understood ironically. In this chapter, I explain the risks of being ironic, and present the traditional clues that ironic speakers can use. Furthermore, I suggest that the list of irony’s clues should be opened to include three new candidates: echo, pretense and opposition. The main pragmatic approaches to irony have considered these three notions to be essential in irony, but my hypothesis is that they should be considered clues –they do not explain what irony is essentially, but how irony works usually.