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Baltic International Yearbook of Cognition, Logic and Communication

2018

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A Logician's Sidelong Glance At Irony, Reinhard Kahle Nov 2018

A Logician's Sidelong Glance At Irony, Reinhard Kahle

Baltic International Yearbook of Cognition, Logic and Communication

In "Irony as Expression (of a Sense of the Absurd)" Mitchell Green is presenting an interesting account of communicative irony where ``we express a sense of a situation's absurdity (wackiness, goofiness, etc.).'' In this line of argument, he is questioning the adequateness of irony as meaning-inversion and irony as conversational implicature. In this note, we would like to take the idea of absurdity a little bit further, considering it in its logical sense. As a consequence we can offer a possibility to defend, at least partially, irony as meaning-inversion and conversational implicature.


Irony As Expression (Of A Sense Of The Absurd), Mitchell Green May 2018

Irony As Expression (Of A Sense Of The Absurd), Mitchell Green

Baltic International Yearbook of Cognition, Logic and Communication

Situational irony is, first, explained as a severe violation of one or more established, non-moral norms; such violation constitutes that situation’s absurdity. The classical “inversion” theory of communicative irony associated with Cicero and Quintilian, as well as its refinement in terms of the notion of conversational implicature (Grice 1989), are then shown to be inadequate.The echoic (Sperber (1984), Wilson (2006), Wilson & Sperber (2012)) and pretence (Currie 2010) theories are also shown to fail to account for the broad range of communicative irony, although they each contain valuable insights. Further, both theories hold that ironic speakers express attitudes but do …