Deciphering Irony by Means of a Semantic-Pragmatic Tool of Interpretation

Abstract

This article analyses a use of irony in a journalistic text; the analysis exemplifies a semantic-pragmatic tool of interpretation based on relevance theory. The implementation of this tool requires quite a bit of work that a typical reader of the press does not need in order to recognize the text as ironic or to decipher its indirect message. The tool is not meant, indeed, for the typical reader of the press but it will be of great help to a researcher that is determined to understand thoroughly the utterance meaning of the text and to decipher the speaker’s indirect meaning. In general, the application of the tool to a specific text will be very useful to scholars that are working, for example, on the intellectual biography of the text’s author, the issue of the public discourse in which the text participates, identifying the intended addressees of the text, and so on. This article elucidates the implementation of the tool to a text that makes ironic use of language; the analysis is based, accordingly, on Deirdre Wilson’s conception of irony. According to this conception (Wilson 2006), verbal irony echoes a specific utterance or thought in order to express a range of dissociative attitudes to them. The tool of interpretation enables the investigator to identify the detail of the speaker’s dissociative position: the echoic content and the dissociative position can be identified by using the tool.