26 Irony
Irony
S Attardo, Youngstown State University, Youngstown,
OH, USA
ß 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
The term ‘irony’ is commonly used to describe both a
linguistic phenomenon (verbal irony) and other phe-
nomena including ‘situational’ irony (i.e., irony of
facts and things dissociated from their linguistic ex-
pression; Shelley, 2001) such as a fire-station burning
to the ground, various more-or-less philosophical
ideas (Socratic irony, Romantic irony, Postmodern
irony), and even a type of religious experience
(Kierkegaard, 1966). While there may be connections
between situational and verbal irony, it does not ap-
pear that literary and religious uses can be fruitfully
explained in terms of linguistic irony. This treatment
will be limited to verbal irony.
Other definitional problems include the purported
distinction between irony and sarcasm. While some
have argued that the two can be distinguished (for
example, irony can be involuntary, while sarcasm
cannot be so), others maintain that no clear boundary
exists. A further problem is presented by the fact that
in some varieties of English, the term irony is under-
going semantic change and is assuming the meaning
of an unpleasant surprise, while the semantic space
previously occupied by irony is taken up by the term
sarcasm.
The word irony goes back to the Greek eironeia
(pretense, dissimulation) as does the history of its
definition and analysis. Irony is seen as a trope (i.e.,
a figure of speech) in ancient rhetorics and this analy-
sis has remained essentially unchallenged until recent-
ly. In the traditional definition irony is seen as saying
something to mean the opposite of what is said. This
definition is demonstrably incorrect, as a speaker may
be ironical but not mean the opposite of what he/she
says; cf. It seems to be a little windy (uttered in the
middle of a violent storm), in which the speaker is
saying less than what is meant. Similarly, overstate-
ments and hyperbole may be ironical (Kreuz and
Roberts, 1995).
A recent and fruitful restatement of the irony-as-
trope theory has been presented by Paul Grice who
sees irony as an implicature, i.e., as a deliberate flout-
ing of one of the maxims of the principle of coopera-
tion. Relatedly, speech-act approaches to irony see it
as an insincere speech act. Initially, Grice’s approach
saw irony as a violation of the maxim of quality
(i.e., the statement of an untruth) but this claim has
been refuted, as seen above. Broadening the definition
to, for example, ‘saying something while meaning
something else,’ runs the risk of obliterating the dif-
ference between irony and other forms of figurative
or indirect speech. However, this loss of distinction
may be a positive aspect of the definition, as has been
recently argued (Kreuz, 2000, Attardo, 2002).
While the idea of ‘oppositeness’ in irony is
problematic, approaches to irony as negation have
been presented (Giora, 1995), who sees irony as ‘in-
direct’ (i.e., inexplicit; cf. Utsumi, 2000) negation;
related ideas are that of contrast (Colston, 2002)
and inappropriateness (Attardo, 2000).
A very influential approach to irony is the mention
theory (Sperber and Wilson, 1981), which claims that
an utterance is ironical if it is recognized as the echoic
mention of another utterance by a more or less clearly
identified other speaker. Furthermore, the ironical
statement must be critical of the echoed utterance
(cf. Grice, 1989: 53–54). Similar theories based on
the ideas of ‘pretense’ and ‘reminder’ have been pre-
sented as well. Criticism of the mention theory notes
that not all irony seems to be interpretable as the echo
of someone’s words, or that if the definition of men-
tion is allowed to encompass any possible mention
it becomes vacuous (since any sentence is potentially
the mention of another sentence). Furthermore, there
exists an admittedly rarer, non-negative, praising
irony, called asteism (Fontanier, 1968: 150). An ex-
ample of asteism might be a colleague describing
Chomsky’s Aspects of the theory of syntax as a
‘moderately influential’ book in linguistics. Other
approaches to irony include the ‘tinge’ theory, which
sees irony as blending the two meanings (the stated
and the implied ones) with the effect of attenuating
the ironical one (Colston, 1997).
All the theories of irony mentioned so far share the
idea that the processing of irony is a two-step process
in which one sense (usually assumed to be the literal
meaning) of the utterance is accessed and then a
second sense of the utterance is discovered (usually
under contextual pressure). Thus, for example, in a
Gricean account of irony as implicature, the hearer of
an utterance such as That was smart (uttered as a
description of clumsy behavior, such as spilling one’s
wine upon someone’s clothing) will first process the
utterance as meaning literally roughly ‘This behavior
was consonant with how smart people behave’ and
then will discard this interpretation in favor of the
implicature that the speaker means that the behavior
was not consonant with how smart people behave.
This account has been challenged recently by ‘direct
access’ theories.
The direct access theories claim that the hearer
does not process the literal meaning of an ironical

utterance first and only later accesses the figurative
(ironical) meaning. Rather, they claim that the literal
meaning is either not accessed at all or only later.
Direct access interpretations of irony are squarely at
odds with the traditional interpretation of irony as an
implicature. Some results in psycholinguistics have
been seen as supporting this view (Gibbs, 1994).
The mention theory of irony was commonly inter-
preted as a direct access theory, but recent work
(Yus, 2003) seems to indicate that it too can be inter-
preted as a two-step process. Other researchers (e.g.,
Dews and Winner, 1999) have presented contrasting
views which support the two-step approach, although
not always the claim that the literal meaning is pro-
cessed first: claims that interpretations are accessed in
order of saliency (Giora, 2003) or in parallel have
been put forth.
Psycholinguistic studies of irony have focused on
children’s acquisition of irony (Winner, 1988), progres-
sively lowering the age at which children under-
stand irony to under ten years old; on the
neurobiology of the processing of irony (McDonald,
2000), emphasizing the role of the right hemisphere
alongside the left one (in which most language proces-
sing takes place); and on the order of activation of the
various meanings in the ironical text. A significant issue
is the degree and nature of the assumptions that the
hearer and speaker must share for irony to be under-
stood; this can be summed up as the ‘theory of mind’
that the speakers have. In particular, irony involves
metarepresentations (Bara et al., 1997, Curcó, 2000).
Considerable attention has been paid to the option-
al markers of irony, i.e., primarily intonational and
kinesic indications of the speaker’s ironical intent.
While several phonological and other features have
been considered ‘markers’ of irony, it appears that
none of these features is exclusively a marker of
irony. Reviews of markers include phonological
(e.g., intonation), graphic (e.g., italics, punctuation),
morphological (e.g., quotatives), kinesic (e.g.,
winking), and contextual clues (Haiman, 1998).
Recently, the social and situational context of irony
as well as its pragmatic ends have begun being inves-
tigated in sociolinguistics and discourse/conversation
analysis as well as in psycholinguistics. Work on the
social functions of irony has found a broad range of
functions, including in- and out-group definition,
evaluation, aggression, politeness, verbal play, and
many others (e.g., Clift, 1999; Anolli et al., 2002;
Gibbs and Colston, 2002; Kotthoff, 2003). It is likely
that this list may be open-ended.
The relationship between irony and humor remains
underexplored, despite their obvious connections,
although some studies are beginning to address the
interplay of irony and other forms of implicature, such
Irony 27
as indirectness, and metaphoricity. Finally, it is worth
noting that dialogic approaches to language (e.g.,
Ducrot, 1984) see irony as a prime example of the
co-presence of different ‘voices’ in the text (see Literary
Pragmatics), in ways that avoid the technical problems
highlighted in the mention theories.
See also: Figures of Speech; Implicature; Negation; Prag-
matics: Overview; Relevance Theory; Speech Acts.
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Irony: Stylistic Approaches
J Boutonnet, University of Wolverhampton,
Wolverhampton, UK
ß 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Most books or articles on the topic start with a warn-
ing that the concept of irony is elusive (Muecke,
1970) and that it takes many forms. Myers (1981:
410) said that ‘‘in irony we inherit both a device
and a concept.’’ Nash (1985) alerted us to the lack
of consistency in usage even among literary critics.
Although dictionaries offer definitions and exempli-
fications, they point to the complexity of the phe-
nomenon rather than enlighten the reader. The
word has both positive and negative connotations
today, a mark of its complex history and range of
functions in discourse. The word does not appear
in the English language until the 16th century and
is only commonly used by speakers from the early
18th century onwards. Clearly the phenomenon
existed before it was named, even prior to the Greek
word from which the English word derives. The
word eironeia to describe the Greek philosopher
Socrates’s treatment of his conversational opponents
is first recorded in Plato’s Republic. Socratic irony
today refers to a discourse strategy whereby the
speaker pretends he or she is learning from an inter-
locutor whilst trying all the while to uncover the
flaws in that person’s argument (Nilsen and Nilsen,
2000).
Conveniently, a distinction is often made between
situational irony and verbal irony. In the first we have
an observer who notices a state of affairs or event
which is in some way incongruous. The second is a
rhetorical device. We have an ironist who produces a
Sperber D & Wilson D (1981). ‘Irony and the use
mention distinction.’ In Cole P (ed.) Radical
Pragmatics. New York/London: Academic Press.
295–318.
Toplak M & Katz A N (2000). ‘On the uses of sarcastic
irony.’ Journal of Pragmatics 32(10), 1467–1488.
Utsumi A (2000). ‘Verbal irony as implicit display of
ironic environment: distinguishing ironic utterances
from nonirony.’ Journal of Pragmatics 32(12),
1777–1806.
Winner E (1988). ‘The point of words: children’s under-
standing of metaphor and irony’. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Yus F (2003). ‘Humor and the search for relevance.’ Journal
of Pragmatics 35(9), 1295–1331.
linguistic message whose meaning is other than the
literal meaning, in many cases understood to be the
opposite of the literal meaning conveyed. There is a
discrepancy between the words and what the speaker
means by these words, an opposition between the
surface and the underlying meaning. This is also
called traditional irony in most writings and is often
attributed to Aristotle (Barbe, 1995).
An oppositional model of verbal irony holds that
the speaker says the opposite of what he or she means.
In this account, irony is unveiled by a process of
substitution of lexical items or propositions. In the
case of stable irony (Booth, 1974), where the intended
meaning is fairly clear, as in ‘‘What a lovely day!’’
uttered on a day when the weather is anything but
pleasant, meaning may be retrieved by word substitu-
tion (e.g., ‘lovely’ for ‘awful’), an example of lexical-
antonymy. Oppositeness is at the heart of Raskin’s
semantic theory of humor (STH) (Raskin, 1985)
where he discussed oppositeness in terms of local
antonymy, two opposite meanings arising from a par-
ticular discourse. At the propositional level, consider
Myers’s (1981: 411) example ‘‘I always wanted to
spend the summer in Detroit,’’ uttered by a speaker
who does not want to spend the summer in Detroit.
Here we have an example of negation at the proposi-
tional level. Some linguists argue that examples like
the one above constitute an instance of criticism cou-
pled with a complaint, also known as nonce irony.
Common irony refers to expressions which have be-
come stock phrases in a language, such as ‘‘that’s a
likely story!’’ (Barbe, 1995: 18–22).
When considering verbal irony, a number of
assumptions need clarification. One often-debated
issue is that of intentionality and sincerity of the