Irony as a Complex Social Phenomenon

Despite studying the phenomen of irony extensively, pragmatics has not reached a definitive understanding of its definition and functions. Irony appears to be the result of different linguistics acts (refusing, echoing, pretending, alluding) that in any case carry out the speaker’s goal to highlight an incongruity between some previous expectations and the current situation. However, there seems to be something else that characterizes irony even more particularly, something that makes it even more distinctively different from other figures of speech, from other rhetorical strategies or structural devices. It is this ‘something else’ that should allow us to understand why anyone would want to use this mode of discourse where you say something you don’t actually mean and expect people to understand not only what you actually do mean but also your attitude toward it. The paper proposes a wider vision of investigation that takes into account the fact that irony is a relational strategy in the sense that it operates not only between meanings (said and unsaid) but also between people. Understanding the phenomenon of irony doesn’t mean only trying to unveil the link between literal meaning and figurative meaning, as psycholinguistic models of ironic utterances have done. Irony, far from being only a way of communicating, is a sophisticated interaction that takes place between highly social beings. To be understood, it requires contextual and metacommunicative elements and also mutual attribution of knowledge, intentions, and affective states between speaker and listener. Defining what the ironic linguistic meaning is allows us to understand just only one aspect of this complex phenomenon, but it doesn’t allow us to understand how irony is an attitude, a way of doing in order to create a relationship, of inclusion as much as exclusion, with others. Understanding the social aspects of irony is a challenge for pragmatics, and it is a crucial communion with cognitive sciences that allows us to have an approach not limited to understanding disparity between literal and figurative meaning but which investigates irony as a social phenomenon that brings together several different cognitive social abilities.