The paper defines the notions of laughter, humour, ridicule and irony in terms of a cognitive model of communication and social action, and analyses some uses of irony and ridiculisation in an Italian trial of high political import, that has been seen as a “degradation ritual” of a whole political class. In ridiculisation, one remarks some lack of power of the other, that contrasts with some pr...

1. Irony in Context: Developmentally and Theoretically For more than twenty years researchers have been trying to determine when children begin to understand irony. But we still don't have a clear answer. While some argue that irony comprehension emerges in early adolescence, Some of this confusion appears to be attributable to differences in the materials and procedures used (Creusere, 1999). ...

This paper considers how two recent accounts of verbal irony – the pretence account and the echoic account – can explain a range of experimental results on the nature of irony and the differences between irony and metaphor. Of particular interest is the fact that irony comprehension correlates with success in standard second-order falsebelief tasks, and therefore requires a higher order of meta...

irony is a tool that implicitly treats social realities by drawing upon wit. such wit is backed up with silent thought and contemplation that would quietly yet effectively shriek man out of his slumber of oblivion. thus, irony is a means to an end and a weapon aimed at certain individuals or groups of people. among the features of ibrahim touqan’s poetry is the sincere and passionate obsession ...