In the dominant view of verbal irony, spearheaded by Elizabeth Camp (2012), one says the opposite of what one means. I think this view fails to account for all the linguistic data. Instead, I offer a purely pragmatic approach to irony, where an ironic utterance flouts sincerity conditions on speech acts, which prompts a quasi-Gricean (1975) inference by the hearers.

               Camp’s account, the meaning-reversal account, posits that flagrant insincerity in an utterance will prompt a mechanism which reverses (or inverts) the meaning of the insincere aspect of the speech act. To account for various data that have accumulated in the literature, Camp supposes that irony can target all aspects of a speech act (from sub-sentential expressions to perlocutionary acts).

Ordinary examples like the following, however, show that meaning reversal is not essential for irony. Suppose that, Monday morning, Deandra and Dennis are talking about their co-worker, Frank, who is supposed to arrive soon. Deandra mentions that Frank always wears a green shirt to work on Mondays, even betting him $20 that Frank wears it today. Right after Dennis accepts the bet, Frank walks in wearing a red shirt. Dennis glances at Deandra, then turns to Frank and says, glibly,

1. What a beautiful green shirt you’ve got on today.

I take this to be an instance of verbal irony, but not an instance of meaning-reversal. Dennis is conspicuously not complimenting Frank’s green shirt, nor, as Camp’s view would predict, is Dennis insulting Frank’s green shirt – that is, he’s not claiming that the green shirt is hideous.

               So what is happening in (1)? On my purely pragmatic theory, Dennis is flouting the saying of (1), which prompts his intended interlocutor, Deandra, to wonder why he would do so. In this instance, Dennis is calling attention to the fact that their expectation, Frank wearing the green shirt, has been foiled. In an ironic utterance, a speaker flouts rules on committed speech (cf. Searle’s 1975 sincerity conditions).  This flouting then prompts the hearer to enter an inference process, asking why the speaker would flout this speech act. In cases where we might presume that the speaker said the opposite of what she means, the hearer will infer – on the basis of the conspicuously insincere utterance – that the speaker believes the opposite of what she made as if to say. Thus, we can account for meaning-reversal as well as more creative uses of irony, like making salient a failed expectation.

 

 

References:

 

Camp, E. (2012). Sarcasm, Pretense, and The Semantics/Pragmatics Distinction. Noûs, 46, 587-634.
Clark, H., & Gerrig, R. (1984). On the Pretense Theory of Irony. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 121-126.
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Searle, J. (1969) Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Searle, J. (1975) A taxonomy of illocutionary acts.  in K. Gunderson (ed.), Language, Mind and Knowledge, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 344–369.
Sperber, D., & Wilson, D. (1981). Irony and the Use-Mention Distinction. In P. (Ed.) Cole, Radical Pragmatics (pp. 295-318). New York: Academic Press.
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