A SPEECH ACT ANALYSIS OF IRONY

The aim of this paper is to show that the category of verbal irony can be properly described within the framework of the theory of speech acts. It is argued that speakers make use of irony in order to produce certain perlocutionary effects on their hearers, the principal ones being to break their patterns of expectation, and involve them in a type of verbal interaction that is characterized by interpersonal distance. The paper starts with a critical evaluation of traditional definitions, which, for the greater part, qualify irony as a rhetoric or stylistic figure of speech. Conceptually, these definitions are centered around two criteria: (1) saying the opposite of what you mean, and (2) saying something different from what you mean. It is the thesis of this paper that both these criteria can be integrated into a homogeneous pragmalinguistic frame of reference. That is to say, taking into account the componential structure of the speech act, the above criteria are found to play an essential part in the analysis of the propositional and the illocutionary component of the speech act, respectively. © 1990.