Inés Lozano-Palacio and Francisco José Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez. 2022. Modeling Irony. A Cognitive-Pragmatic Account

What is it about?

This review sets out to critically examine the latest contribution by Lozano-Palacio and Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez, Modeling Irony. A cognitive-pragmatic account (Benjamins, 2022). It is shown that the work represents a major contribution to the study of irony within cognitive linguistics, because irony has been a figure of speech scarcely dealt with so far in this theoretical model. Moreover, the authors focus on the study of irony in literary texts, which is an aspect that had been largely neglected within linguistics and pragmatics. Likewise, the work offers a unified framework which makes it possible to explain both verbal irony and situational irony and their manifestations in literature. A fully comprehensive approach to the study of irony is also achieved with the authors’ distinction between basic and readapted ironic uses. The analysis is enriched with a thorough study of the uses of irony in a variety of different contexts.

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