Cover not available
Part of
The Pragmatics of Irony and Banter
Edited by Manuel Jobert and Sandrine Sorlin
[Linguistic Approaches to Literature 30] 2018
► pp. 1–19

Chapter 1
Introduction

The intricacies of irony and banter

| University of Lyon 3, CREA Paris-Nanterre, France
| Aix Marseille Univ, LERMA-IUF, Aix-en-Provence, France

This introductory chapter starts with a brief presentation of what triggered our interest in the joint study of irony and . We then delve into the theoretical intricacies of these two discursive practices. We review the major theoretical frameworks that have contributed to our understanding of these practices and pinpoint some crucial issues. We conclude with an overview of the different viewpoints expressed and adopted in the following chapters.

Article outline
  • 1.Origins and objectives
  • 2.What is an ironical utterance?
    • 2.1Beyond the classical trope
    • 2.2Subcategories
  • 3.Competing theories
  • 4.Defining
    • 4.1A cultural approach
    • 4.2Linguistic approaches to
  • 5.Book contents
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 25 April 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lal.30.01job
References
Attardo, Salvatore
2000a Irony as relevant inappropriateness. Journal of Pragmatics 32: 793–826. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2000b Irony markers and functions: Towards a goal-oriented theory of irony and its processing. RASK: Internationalt Tidsskrift for Sprogog Kommunikation 12: 3–20.Google Scholar
Barbe, Katharina
1993 Isn’t it ironic that…? Explicit irony markers. Journal of Pragmatics 20: 578–590. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
1995 Irony in Context [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 34]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Black, Elizabeth
2006 Pragmatic Stylistics. Edinburgh: EUP.Google Scholar
Booth, Wayne C.
1974 A Rhetoric of Irony. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Brown, Gillian
1990 Listening to Spoken English. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Clark, Herbert & Gerrig, Richard
1984 On the pretense theory of irony. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 113(1): 121–126. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Colston, Herbert & O’Brien, Jennifer
2000 Contrast and pragmatics in figurative language: Anything understatement can do, irony can do better. Journal of Pragmatics 32: 1557–1583. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Colston, Herbert L.
2007 Salting a wound or sugaring a pill: The pragmatic functions of ironic criticism. In Irony in Language and Thought. A Cognitive Science Reader, Raymond W. Gibbs & Herbert L. Colston (eds), 319–338. New York NY: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Crystal, David & Quirk, Randolph
1964 Systems of Prosodic and Paralinguistic Features in English. The Hague: Mouton.Google Scholar
Crystal, David
1969 Prosodic Systems and Intonation in English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Culpeper, Jonathan
1996 Towards an Anatomy of Impoliteness. Journal of Pragmatics 25(3): 349–367. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2011 Impoliteness. Using Language to Cause Offence. Cambridge: CUP. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Dews, Shelly, Kaplan, Joan & Winner, Ellen
2007 Why not say it directly? The social functions of irony. In Irony in Language and Thought. A Cognitive Science Reader, Raymond W. Gibbs & Herbert L. Colston (eds), 297–317. New York NY: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Ducrot, Oswald
1980 Les Echelles argumentatives. Paris: Minuit.Google Scholar
2010 Ironie et négation. In Ironie et un peu plus. Hommage à Oswald Ducrot pour son 80ème anniversaire, Vahram Atayan & Ursula Wienen (eds), 169–179. Berne: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Dynel, Marta
2008 No aggression, only teasing: The pragmatics of teasing and banter. Lodz Papers in Pragmatics 4(2): 241–261 DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(ed.) 2011 The Pragmatics of Humour across Discourse Domains [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 210]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2013 Irony from a neo-Gricean perspective: On untruthfulness and evaluative implicature. Intercultural Pragmatics 10: 403–431. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2014 Isn’t it ironic? Defining the scope of humorous irony. Humor 27(4): 619–639. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2016 Pejoration via sarcastic irony and sarcasm. In Pejoration [Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 228], Rita Finkbeiner, Jörg Meibauer & Heike Wiese (eds), 219–239. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fontanier, Pierre
1830[1977] Les figures du discours. Paris: Flammarion.Google Scholar
Fox, Kate
2004 Watching the English. The Hidden Rule of English Behaviour. London: Hodder.Google Scholar
Gibbs, Raymond W.
1994 The Poetics of Mind: Figurative Thought, Language and Understanding. Cambridge: CUP.Google Scholar
2002 A new look at literal meaning in understanding what is said and implicated. Journal of Pragmatics 34: 457–486. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Giora, Rachel
1995 On irony and negation. Discourse Processes 19: 239–264. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
1997 Discourse coherence and the theory of relevance: Stumbling blocks in search of a unified theory. Journal of Pragmatics 27: 17–34. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2003 On Our Mind: Salience, Context, and Figurative Language. Oxford: OUP. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2011 Will anticipating irony facilitate it immediately? In The Pragmatics of Humour across Discourse Domains, Marta Dynel (ed.), 19–31. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Giora, Rachel & Fein, Ofer
1999 On understanding familiar and less familiar figurative language. Journal of Pragmatics 31: 1601–1618. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Giora, Rachel, Fein, Ofer, Laadan, Dafna, Wolfson, Jon, Zeituny, Michal, Kidrons, Ran, Kaufman, Ronnie & Shaham, Ronit
2007 Expecting irony: Context vs. salience-based effects. Metaphor and Symbol 22(2): 119–146. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Holmes, Janet
2000 Politeness, power and provocation: How humour functions in the workplace. Discourse Studies 2(2): 159–185. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Keltner, Dacher, Young, Randall C., Heery, Erin A., Oeming, Carmen & Monarch, Natalie D.
1998 Teasing in hierarchical and intimate relations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 75(5): 1231–1247. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Keltner, Dacher, Capps, Lisa, Kring, Ann M., Young, Randall C. & Heerey, Erin A.
2001 Just teasing: A conceptual analysis and empirical review. Psychological Bulletin 127(2): 229–248. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kerbrat-Orecchioni, Catherine
1980 L’ironie comme trope. Poétique 41: 108–127.Google Scholar
Kreuz, Roger J. & Glucksberg, Sam
1989 How to be sarcastic: The reminder theory of verbal irony. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 113: 112–120.Google Scholar
Kreuz, Roger, Long, Debra & Church, Mary
1991 On being ironic: Pragmatic and mnemonic implications. Metaphor and Symbolic Activity 6: 149–162. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kumon-Nakamura, Sachi, Glucksberg, Sam & Brown, Mary
2007 How about another piece of pie: The allusional pretense theory of discourse irony. In Irony in Language and Thought. A Cognitive Science Reader, Raymond W. Gibbs & Herbert L. Colston (eds), 57–95. New York NY: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Labov, William
1972 Language in the Inner City. Studies in the Black Vernacular. Philadelphia PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
Leech, Geoffrey
1983 Principles of Pragmatics. London: Longman.Google Scholar
2014 The Pragmatics of Politeness. Oxford: OUP. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Levinson, Stephen C.
1983 Pragmatics. Cambridge: CUP.Google Scholar
Le Guern, Michel
1975 Eléments pour une histoire de la notion d’ironie. Linguistique et Semiology 2: 47–59.Google Scholar
Louw, Bill
1993 Irony in the text or insincerity in the writer? The diagnostic potential of semantic prosodies. In Text and Technology: In Honour of John Sinclair, Mona Baker, Gill Francis & Elena Tognini-Bonelli (eds), 157–176. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
MacInnes, Paul
2011 The Art of Banter: ‘It’s like a boxing match. It can be bruising’. The Guardian Tuesday 8 November.Google Scholar
Morini, Massimiliano
2010 The poetics of disengagement: Jane Austen and echoic irony. Language and Literature 19(4): 1–18. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2016 Irony. In The Bloomsbury Companion to Styistics, Violeta Sotirova (ed.), 553–566. London: Bloomsbury.Google Scholar
Muecke, Douglas C.
1970 Irony. London: Methuen.Google Scholar
Partington, Alan
2007 Irony and reversal of evaluation. Journal of Pragmatics 39: 1547–1569. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Peleg, Orna, Giora, Rachel & Fein, Ofer
2008 Resisting contextual information: You can’t put a salient meaning down. Lodz Papers in Pragmatics 4: 13–44. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Perelman, Chaïm & Olbrechts-Tyteca, Lucie
1954 Traité de l’argumentation: La nouvelle rhétorique. Paris: PUF.Google Scholar
Shelley, Cameron
2001 The bicoherence theory of situational irony. Cognitive Science 25: 775–818. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Simpson, Paul
2011 “That’s not ironic, that’s just stupid.” Towards an eclectic account of the discourse of irony. In The Pragmatics of Humour across Discourse Domains, Marta Dynel (ed.), 33–50. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Seto, Ken-ichi
1998 On non-echoic irony. In Relevance Theory: Applications and Implications [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 37], Robyn Carston & Seiji Uchida (eds), 240–255. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sperber, Dan & Wilson, Deirdre
1981 Irony and the use-mention distinction. In Radical Pragmatics, Peter Cole (ed.), 295–318. New York NY: Academic Press.Google Scholar
1986 Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
1992 On verbal irony. Lingua 87: 53–76. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Toplak, Mary & Katz, Albert
2000 On the uses of sarcastic irony. Journal of Pragmatics 32: 1467–1488. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Utsumi, Akira
2000 Verbal irony as implicit display of ironic environment: Distinguishing ironic utterances from nonirony. Journal of Pragmatics 32: 1777–1806. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Van Overbeke, Maurits
2004 Quand rire, c’est “faire rire aux dépens”. Notes sur l’ironie. In Seduction, Community, Speech [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 127], Frank Brisard, Michael Meeuwis & Bart Vandenabeele (eds), 97–113. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Watts, Richard J.
2003 Politeness. Key Topics in Sociolinguistics. Cambridge: CUP. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wilson, Deirdre
2006 The pragmatics of verbal irony: Echo and pretence? Lingua 116: 1722–1743. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2013 Irony comprehension: A developmental perspective. Journal of Pragmatics 59: 40–56. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Yule, George
1996 Pragmatics. Oxford: OUP.Google Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 2 other publications

Baider, Fabienne & Maria Constantinou
2020. Covert hate speech. Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict 8:2 ► pp. 262 ff. DOI logo
Sorlin, Sandrine & Tuija Virtanen
2024. Chapter 2. A pragmatic model of hypocrisy. In The Pragmatics of Hypocrisy [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 343], ► pp. 15 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 22 march 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.