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Part of
Irony in Language Use and Communication
Edited by Angeliki Athanasiadou and Herbert L. Colston
[Figurative Thought and Language 1] 2017
► pp. 179–200

Chapter 8
Cognitive modeling and irony

This chapter studies the role of the pragmatic notion of echo in creating ironic meaning. The notion of echo is treated as a cognitive operation rather than just a pragmatic task, which combines with other cognitive operations of at least two kinds: concept-building and inferential. The former operations include the creation of echoed and observed scenarios. The latter include the cancellation and addition of structure in an echoed scenario resulting from the contrast between the two scenarios. This account of irony, which is complementary of the one developed in Relevance Theory, allows us to trace the origin of the speaker’s attitudinal component in an ironic utterance to the underlying cognitive activity involving the cancellation of echoed assumptions within an inferential reasoning schema.
Keywords: cognitive operations, contrasting operations, echo, figurative thinking, idealized cognitive models, inferential pragmatics, Pretense Theory, Relevance Theory, speaker’s attitude
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.A brief overview of approaches
  • 3.Echoing
  • 4.Ironic echoing
  • 5.Contrasting
  • 6.Cognitive modeling
  • 7.Modeling irony
  • 8.Special cases of echoing operations involving irony
  • 9.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
Published online: 14 December 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ftl.1.09dem
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