Edited by Mario Brdar and Rita Brdar-Szabó
[Figurative Thought and Language 16] 2022
► pp. 185–212
Unlike metaphor and metonymy, irony has no “standardized” conceptual tools to rely on for its detection. The detection of irony proceeds entirely on-line; its comprehension does not rest on prior acquisition of conventional figures in the processes of language learning; it rests on our ability to establish, creatively and on-line, a dynamic relationship between our knowledge of language and the relevant information about the communicative situation and its protagonists. The goal of the present study is to shed light on the conceptual underpinnings of on-line interpretation of two main types of irony, verbal and situational, within a communicative context, using the methodological tools of cognitive linguistics, specifically Blending Theory (Fauconnier & Turner, 2002) and frame semantics (Fillmore, 1977, 1982, 1985).