Ironiaren teoria minimala

Abstract

Among the accounts that explain ironic communication from a pragmatic perspective, Grice's approach (Grice 1967a/89, 1967b/89) and the Echoic theory (Sperber & Wilson 1981; Wilson & Sperber 2012) might be the most influential ones. These two accounts set rather strong conditions for an ironic utterance: according to Grice, the ironic speaker flouts the first sub-maxim of Quality and thereby implicates the contradictory of the literal meaning of the utterance; according to Sperber and Wilson, the ironic speaker echoes a thought or utterance that she attributes to someone other than herself (at the current time), while she dissociates herself from that utterance or thought. Here I show that both accounts have trouble to explain some sort of ironic examples based on their notions of contradiction and dissociation. Then, I defend a different position. My proposal is as follows: instead of trying to accommodate the strong notions of echo and opposition into the vast variety of ironic examples, I defend that what ties together all instances of irony is something more basic –a minimal set of conditions. Finally, I argue that echo and contradiction should be understood as clues of irony.