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5 - Attitude Expression in Irony

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 March 2018

Joana Garmendia
Joana Garmendia
Affiliation:
University of the Basque Country, Bilbao
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Summary

When being ironic the speaker always expresses a certain attitude –that is something unanimously accepted among the pragmatic theories analyzing ironic communication. It was Grice who first signaled the importance of attitude expression in irony. Furthermore, it seems that he intended to claim that this attitude is always of a negative sort. However, most pragmatic accounts are not ready to accept this extreme: they accept that you can be ironic and express a positive attitude. Positive ironies do exist, they claim, even in they are scarcer than classical negative ironies. This imbalance between negative and positive ironies is called the asymmetry issue of irony. The challenge for the theories is to explain why this asymmetry exists: why we are usually negative when being ironic. In this chapter, I analyze how different theories explain this issue. I also explain why there are still some authors who claim that we always express negative attitudes in irony –that is, that there exist no real positive ironies. Finally, I introduce an account that might help us approach the issue from a different perspective: Dews and Winner’s Tinge Hypothesis, according to which the attitude attached to the literal meaning tinges the hearer’s interpretation of the ironic meaning.
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Irony , pp. 88 - 106
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2018

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References

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