This paper explores the risks and reward of ironic communication. We argue that irony can not be characterized simply as having positive or negative social impact, but can serve multiple communicative purposes, depending on the social context and aims of the conversational participants. Irony may either distance, or bond, speakers and listeners. Contrary to the standard view, understanding iron...

irony is a technique in figurative language which is very common in the works of mahdi akhavaan saales and can be considered as a prominent feature in his style. although irony is used as a common technique by many iranian writers, many critics have not studied it fully. the author of this article studies irony in the works of mahdi akhavaan saales.

Difficulties in understanding irony and sarcasm are part of the social cognition deficits in patients with schizophrenia. A number of studies have reported higher error rates during comprehension in patients with schizophrenia. However, the relationships of these impairments to schizotypal personality traits and other language deficits, such as the comprehension of proverbs, are unclear. We inv...

In this essay, the use of postmodern rhetorical irony as a subversive strategy is explored. In particular, Susan Dorothea White's painting, The First Supper, is analyzed as a subversive, postmodern ironic reading of Leonardo da Vinci's famed work, The Last Supper. This analysis suggests that subversive irony assumes distinctive and complex technical and theoretical characteristics, most relevan...

The traditional theory of irony, which assumes that an ironist uses a figurative meaning opposite to the literal meaning of the utterance, is shown to be inadequate; an alternative theory is presented, which assumes that the ironist mentions the literal meaning of the utterance and expresses an attitude toward it. Although the implications for understanding irony are difficult to test, the two ...

Resources for an authentic response to the ‘post-ecologist condition’ as described by Ingolfur Blühdorn can be found in a cultural modernism which emphasises the contradictory nature of the human condition and whose master trope is irony. The concept of irony can help us both diagnose and respond to the crisis in public meaning which helps sustain unsustainable behaviour. Forms of dispositional...

In this paper, we empirically investigate whether people understand irony from computers in order to test the recent argument for an egocentric tendency in irony comprehension. In the experiment, participants took a timed math test comprising 10 questions of 3-digit by 2-digit multiplication. After that, they received a feedback comment on their performance (including potentially ironic sentenc...