On the pretense theory of irony.

Abstract

We propose a pretense theory of irony based on suggestions by Grice and Fowler. In being ironic, the theory goes, a speaker is pretending to be an injudicious person speaking to an uninitiated audience; the speaker intends the addresses of the irony to discover the pretense and thereby see his or her attitude toward the speaker, the audience, and the utterance. The pretense theory, we argue, is superior to the mention theory of irony proposed by Sperber and Wilson.