What is it about?
This chapter explains how both verbal irony (what people say) and situational irony (what happens) can be understood using the same underlying cognitive principles. The authors introduce the idea of an epistemic scenario—a mental model of what someone believes is likely or expected—and show how irony arises when this expected scenario clashes with what is actually observable. In verbal irony, this often involves pretended agreement with someone’s belief, sometimes expressed through echoing their words or using agreement phrases like “yeah, sure.” In situational irony, the clash comes from a strong assumption about how the world works that is unexpectedly contradicted. By examining a wide collection of examples from daily speech, TV shows, literature, and public discourse, the chapter shows how both kinds of irony rely on the same mechanisms of reasoning and expectation tracking. The authors use these insights to propose a unified framework that explains how irony is created, perceived, and interpreted across different modes—spoken, visual, multimodal, and situational.
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Why is it important?
This work is important because it dissolves the traditional division between verbal and situational irony and demonstrates that both stem from the same cognitive processes. Instead of treating irony as a set of unrelated forms, the authors show that ironic meaning consistently emerges from comparing what people believe should happen with what actually happens. This unified model helps clarify long‑standing disagreements between major theories (such as Relevance Theory and Pretense Theory) by showing how their insights can be integrated within a broader cognitive framework. The approach also provides tools for analyzing irony in everyday communication, literature, media, and visual art. By offering a systematic way to classify and interpret different kinds of irony, the chapter opens the door to more precise research on irony’s role in communication, reasoning, and social interaction.
Perspectives
Writing this chapter was an opportunity to bring coherence to decades of theoretical debate surrounding irony. By examining hundreds of real examples, we were able to show that irony—whether spoken, visual, or situational—is not a collection of isolated phenomena but a unified cognitive process grounded in how people manage expectations and evaluate evidence. What I found most rewarding was demonstrating how epistemic scenarios and pretended agreement can illuminate both everyday ironic remarks and the more elaborate forms of irony found in literature and art. My hope is that this work helps readers appreciate the subtle reasoning processes behind irony and encourages scholars to look beyond traditional boundaries when studying figurative meaning
Professor Francisco J. Ruiz de Mendoza
University of La Rioja
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: On verbal and situational irony, May 2021, John Benjamins,
DOI: 10.1075/ftl.11.07rui.
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