The author discusses verbal irony as an interpretative notion, described in its various realizations and thus placed within linguistics and pragmatics. She provides an eclectic approach to irony in context, a study of how conversational irony works, and how it compares with other concepts in which it plays a role. In addition, by means of the analysis of irony as an integrated pervasive feature of language, some basic unstated, literacy and culture-dependent assumptions about language are questioned..