What is it about?
This article offers a unified way of understanding irony by bringing together insights from linguistics and literary criticism. It argues that irony always involves two mental scenarios: an echoed scenario (a belief, assumption, or cultural model being invoked) and an observable scenario (what is actually happening). When these two conflict, the result is an ironic attitude such as skepticism, criticism, or mockery. The authors show how this linguistic approach benefits from literary theory’s broader view of context, which includes cultural, social, and historical knowledge. They introduce analytical tools such as ironist types (solidary vs. hierarchical), interpreter types (naïve vs. non‑naïve), and degrees of felicity, which help explain why irony is sometimes easily recognized and sometimes misunderstood. They also outline how different ironic uses—Socratic, rhetorical, satiric, dramatic, metafictional, and postmodern—reflect historical developments in how societies communicate, persuade, or critique.
Featured Image
Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash
Why is it important?
This work is important because it provides a systematic and interdisciplinary account of irony, an area often divided between linguistic analysis (which focuses on cognitive mechanisms) and literary criticism (which emphasizes cultural and historical context). By integrating both perspectives, the article offers a model capable of explaining not just how irony is produced and interpreted, but why it evolves across different time periods and genres. The scenario‑based approach clarifies why irony can be difficult, elitist, or ambiguous, and how the success of an ironic remark depends on the relationship between speaker and interpreter. It also shows that many seemingly different forms of irony—from Socrates’s teaching method to modern political speeches and postmodern fiction—share the same cognitive foundations. This makes the framework useful for researchers in discourse analysis, cognitive linguistics, literary studies, and communication.
Perspectives
Working on this article was an opportunity to demonstrate how much richer our understanding of irony becomes when linguistic theory and literary criticism inform one another. I especially enjoyed showing that irony is not simply a stylistic flourish but a complex cognitive and cultural phenomenon shaped by social hierarchy, historical context, and the interplay between speakers and interpreters. By distinguishing types of ironists and interpreters, and by tracing the evolution of ironic uses across centuries—from Socratic dialogue to postmodern metafiction—we aimed to provide scholars with a clearer, more unified toolkit. My hope is that this work encourages others to cross disciplinary boundaries and explore irony not only as a linguistic puzzle but as a window into how people think, relate, and critique their world.
Professor Francisco J. Ruiz de Mendoza
University of La Rioja
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Unraveling Irony: from Linguistics to Literary Criticism and Back, Cognitive Semantics, February 2019, Brill,
DOI: 10.1163/23526416-00501006.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
