This paper deals with paradox and oxymoron. Adopting a cognitive-pragmatic perspective, the author investigates these two figures of thought and the contextual effects that underlie their production and interpretation. The analysis is based on expressions that have been extracted from a multi-faceted collection of data compiled from different corpora. Apart from the identification of two different types of paradox (verbal and situational), the author describes the most prototypical contextual effects of these tropes and shows that paradox and oxymoron can also co-occur with other conceptual phenomena such as metonymy and metaphor.