What is it about?
This chapter explores irony from the perspective of cognitive modeling, showing that ironic meaning arises from a set of interacting cognitive operations. Central to the account is the idea of echoing—not just repeating someone’s words, but mentally reactivating a previously held belief or assumption. The speaker then contrasts this echoed scenario with an observed scenario, which reflects the actual situation. When the two scenarios clash, the mind cancels part of the echoed structure and adds new conceptual material, producing the attitudinal effects typical of irony, such as skepticism or disappointment. The chapter integrates insights from Relevance Theory while going further, explaining not only that ironic utterances convey attitude but how this attitude arises through structured cognitive activity. It examines operations such as domain expansion, domain reduction, similarity detection, and structural contrast, and shows how they interact in the formation of ironic meaning.
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Why is it important?
This work is important because it provides a systematic cognitive explanation of irony, a phenomenon often treated as a vague matter of “tone” or speaker attitude. By identifying the specific cognitive operations involved—echoing, contrasting, cancellation, and addition of conceptual structure—the chapter makes it possible to predict how ironic meaning emerges and why it produces particular emotional effects. It also clarifies the relationship between irony and other figurative uses such as metaphor, metonymy, and hyperbole, showing how these fit within a unified framework of cognitive modeling. Furthermore, the chapter strengthens the link between pragmatic theories of irony and cognitive‑linguistic approaches, producing an account that is both psychologically plausible and analytically precise. This helps researchers understand why irony sometimes requires inferential work, why some ironic remarks are immediately clear, and how deeper forms of irony, such as structural echoing, can still be explained by the same cognitive mechanisms.
Perspectives
Writing this chapter allowed me to address an unresolved gap in theories of irony: the lack of a clear explanation of where ironic attitude comes from. By examining irony through the lens of cognitive operations, I was able to show that attitude is not an added feature but the natural result of scenario-building, contrast, and inferential adjustment. I particularly enjoyed demonstrating that irony—often seen as a peripheral or stylistic device—rests on the same conceptual machinery that underlies metaphor, metonymy, hyperbole, and other figurative processes. My hope is that this work encourages readers to see irony as a window into the architecture of human reasoning and not simply as a rhetorical flourish.
Professor Francisco J. Ruiz de Mendoza
University of La Rioja
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Chapter 8. Cognitive modeling and irony, November 2017, John Benjamins,
DOI: 10.1075/ftl.1.09dem.
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