| in | The Bulletin of the Institute of Socio-Information and Communication Studies, the University of Tokyo, No.55, 1997, pp.91-127 |
The traditional view on irony defines it as a "figure of speech", which means merely the opposite of the literal meaning. For example,
- irony
- the expression of one's meaning by using words of the opposite meaning in order to make one's remark forceful, e.g. that will please him (used of something that will not please him at all).
The Oxford Paperback Dictionary, 3rd ed.
From this viewpoint there
is no way to answer the following questions.
First, consider that the
ironical utterance (ex. How clever you are) has a deeper impression on the hearer than the literal expression (ex. How stupid you are). This raise the question; what makes irony more than the literal equivalent?
Second, irony is always
used to create an unpleasant impression.
Think also of the fact that there is no irony
such as How stupid you are to admire the hearer's intelligence. This
raise the question as to why irony has such
an asymmetry in its use.
Finally, as Grice(1967)
pointed out, there is something strange about
saying, Speaking ironically, you are so clever. The effect of irony is spoiled by adding such an explicit marker. In case of a metaphor, one can add without any inappropriateness such a prefix as speaking metaphorically. In other words, irony must remain implicit to be ironical, while metaphor does not require implicitness to be metaphorical. What creates this difference between irony and metaphor?
In recent years, several
theories of irony have been proposed, including
so-called Mention Theory by Sperber and Wilson(1981),
Pretense Theory by Clark and Gerring(1984),
Mimetic Utterance Theory by Hashimoto(1989),
and so on. They succeed in answering the
above question partly but fails as a whole.
In this paper, I make a critical assessment
of their theories, and give my own account
of irony as such a kind of speech act as
with an intention to show its infelicities.
From the viewpoint of Generalized Utterance-Agent
Theory which is proposed by Hashimoto(1995),
I formulate the speech act of irony as follows.
I SHOW you that it is infelicitous that X PERFORM that p [it entails that X is not I as a collorary]