ILCLI

Irony is acknowledged to be usually critical: the ironic speaker tends to exhibit an apparent positive attitude in order to communicate a negative valuation. The reverse is considered to be also possible though: the ironic speaker can praise by apparent blaming, although it seldom happens. This unbalance between the two sorts of ironic examples is the so-called asymmetry issue of irony. Here I shall deny the possibility of being ironic without criticizing — hence the asymmetry issue is an illusion. By claiming that irony is always critical I suggest an even stronger claim: criticism is what distinguishes irony from the similar phenomenon of metaphor.

Explaining ironic communication from a pragmatic standpoint has proven to be a challenge as interesting as it has been tricky. Some leading theories got off to a promising start in this endeavor, but they ended up making some rather forced maneuvers when counterexamples were presented one after the other. I shall show that a satisfactory explanation can be offered for ironic utterances: The ironic speaker's lack of commitment toward one of the contents of the utterance is the starting point of a communicative act in which the ironic content is implicated. My proposal is called the “Asif-Theory,” and it is grounded in Korta and Perry's Critical Pragmatics.

Explaining ironic communication from a pragmatic standpoint has proved to be a challenge as interesting as it has been tricky: when analyzing what an ironic speaker communicates (and how she does so), arise the fundamental questions which every pragmatic theory of natural language must face.

Here I have firstly considered the main pragmatic approaches that have intended to explain ironic communication. The problems and limitations found in other authors’ theories, have help me detect irony’s own difficulties. Then, I’ve situated these difficulties on pragmatic grounds, and concluded that the what is said issue affects not only irony, but Pragmatics in general.

In order to face the what is said issue, I’ve opted to follow the Critical Pragmatics approach, founded by Korta & Perry (2006, 2007). I’ve analyzed and developed its theoretical grounds, in order to establish the basis for an adequate pragmatic analysis of utterances in general and ironic utterances specifically.

Building upon these bases, I have put forward a general and detailed theory for explaining irony. Irony is an asif-phenomenon: the ironic speaker makes as if to say a content of her utterance –by overtly showing the intentional mismatch between that content and her beliefs—, and implicates a different content. Moreover, irony has some special features that distinguish it from other asif-phenomena (criticism, humor and some distinguishing means of expression). That’s the central claim of this dissertation.

To finish with, I have studied how this analysis of irony can contribute to the study of some other close phenomena –metaphors, fiction and pretense have been briefly considered.

What is the relationship between words and reality? Which are the best ways to convince or persuade other people? Besides philosophy and grammar, ancient Greeks developed rhetoric to answer these questions. The twentieth-century brought the birth of semantics and pragmatics for a systematic study of linguistic meaning and linguistic acts. Meaning, Intentions, and Argumentation brings together the work of leading contemporary scholars approaching those issues from various perspectives—from the old disciplines of philosophy and rhetoric to the newest thinking on semantics and pragmatics—to illuminate crucial aspects of meaning, communication, argumentation, and persuasion.

Filosofia gaitzat hartuta euskaraz egin den lehen gida duzu eskuetan. Epistemologia, etika, estetika, metafisika…, filosofiaren gai eta kezka nagusiak ekarri ditugu liburu honetara. Gidako testu guztiak originalak dira eta euskaraz izan dira idatziak. Testuen idazleak filosofian adituak dira.

Liburu honetan, filosofiaren historiarekin batera, filosofiaren gai eta esparru zehatzak sistematikoki lantzen dira. Atal bakoitzean gai horren bilakaera historikoa, argudio nagusiak, arazoak, gaur egungo egoera eta oinarrizko bibliografia aurkituko dituzu. Horrekin batera, liburuaren azkeneko atalean, gai horiek jorratzeko maneiatu beharreko metodologia ere azaltzen da.

Abstract. Many pragmatic accounts of irony were proposed over the last decades. The best known may be the Gricean approach (Grice 1989a, 1989b), the echoic account (Sperber and Wilson 1981, 1995 [1986]; Wilson 2006, 2009) and the pretense theory (Clark and Gerrig 1984). These approaches state that irony consists in communicating the opposite, echoing or pretending, respectively. My aim here is to show that what defines verbal irony is something subtler: an overt clash between contents is the only thing that we shall find in every ironic utterance. On a different level, the relationships between irony and criticism on the one hand, and irony and humor on the other, have also been of great interest to authors working in the field. Different positions are defended regarding these two issues: here I will claim that criticism is an essential condition for ironic utterances, whereas humor is a consequence of some basic characteristics of irony.