Zer esan ironiaz

Abstract

One of the main debates in Pragmatics nowadays deals with the concept of what is said by an utterance (i.e., what a speaker says by uttering a sentence). With regard to irony, the issue of what is said is especially complicated: the problem is not to decide what is exactly said by an ironic utterance, but rather to clarify in the first place whether there is anything really said. Many authors have proposed to replace what is said by a special concept in the analysis of irony. But some costs are involved: the speaker's commitment, which is usually linked to what is said, loses its position in the pragmatic explanation of utterance content; besides, the input for the implicatures needs clarification, since the inference of implicatures is usually considered to start from what is said. I will focus on these two problems, showing that some pragmatic assumptions should be rejected in order to offer a satisfactory answer.