Chapter published in:
Irony in Language Use and Communication
Edited by Angeliki Athanasiadou and Herbert L. Colston
[Figurative Thought and Language 1] 2017
► pp. 61–84

Chapter 3
In defense of an ecumenical approach to irony

The term “irony” has such a broad and apparently diverse range of application that it’s difficult for researchers to coordinate on a single, operational concept of their target of investigation, suitable for designing and interpreting experiments aimed at uncovering irony’s nature. Restrictive strategies for addressing this difficulty advocate restricting the target of empirical irony studies to some scientifically tractable subset of the phenomena “irony” picks out in ordinary language. Ecumenical approaches, in contrast, retain the ambition to account for “irony” across its apparently diverse range of usage. In this paper, I highlight the limitations of the best developed restrictivist approaches, throwing into relief the potential value of ecumenical strategies still in early stages of development.
Keywords: ecumenical approach [to irony], restrictive approach [to irony], discursive diversity, the problem of promiscuous application, ethics [of irony], aesthetics [of irony], cognitive mechanisms, irony across media, visual irony
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • 1.The problem of promiscuous application
  • 2.The restrictive-ecumenical continuum
  • 3.The case for restrictivism
  • 4.The inadequacy of restrictivism
    • 4.1What should a good theory of irony accomplish?
    • 4.2The limitations of restrictivism
  • 5.The attractions of an ecumenical approach
  • Conclusion: Is an ecumenical approach viable?
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 14 December 2017
https://doi.org/10.1075/ftl.1.04wil
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