Irony, Quotation, and Other Forms of Staged Intertextuality : double or Contrastive Perspectivation in Conversation

Abstract

In this article I apply concepts of perspectivation (Graumann<br />1989, 1993, Kallmeyer/ Keim 1996, Sandig 1996),<br />intertextuality and polyphonic voicing (Bakhtin 1981) to<br />conversational irony, parody, and quotation.<br /><br />The concepts of perspectivation and polyphonic voicing can<br />help to distinguish various forms of doubly-voiced speech from<br />one another, basically forms of citation and irony. There is a<br />critical debate over the 'mention-approach to irony' of Sperber& Wilson (1981) and Wilson & Sperber (1992), who do not<br />satisfactorily distinguish between playful quotation and irony.<br /><br />'Staged intertextuality' is proposed here as a higher-order<br />concept for various ways of animating voices (in the sense of<br />Goffman 1981). Many discourse analysts (Tannen 1984,<br />Sperber & Wilson 1981, Wilson & Sperber 1992, Barbe 1995)<br />understand quite diverse types of 'staged intertextuality' as<br />irony, an approach which will be criticized here.