Irony English Language
Irony in the English language refers to the use of words to convey a meaning that is the opposite of their literal interpretation, often for humorous or sarcastic effect. It involves a discrepancy between what is said and what is meant, adding depth and complexity to communication. English language learners often find irony challenging to understand due to its nuanced and context-dependent nature.
6 Key excerpts on "Irony English Language"
...There are two broad uses in everyday parlance. The first relates to cosmic irony and has little to do with the play of language or figural speech. A Wimbledon commentator may say, ‘Ironically, it was the year that he was given a wild-card entry, and not as a seeded player, that the Croatian won the title.’ The irony here refers, like linguistic irony, to a doubleness of sense or meaning. It is as though there is the course of human events and intentions, involving our awarding of rankings and expectations, that exists alongside another order of fate beyond our predictions. This is an irony of situation, or an irony of existence; it is as though human life and its understanding of the world is undercut by some other meaning or design beyond our powers. It is this form of irony that covers everything from statements such as, ‘Ironically, Australians are spending more than ever on weight-loss formulas while becoming increasingly obese’, to observations like, ‘The film ends ironically, with the music of the young and hopeful cellist played as we see her crippled and wasted body.’ In such cases, the word irony refers to the limits of human meaning; we do not see the effects of what we do, the outcomes of our actions, or the forces that exceed our choices. Such irony is cosmic irony, or the irony of fate. Related to cosmic irony, or the way the word ‘irony’ covers twists of fate in everyday life, is the more literary concept of dramatic or tragic irony. This is most intense when the audience knows what will happen, so that a character can be viewed from an almost God-like position where we see her at the mercy of the plot or destiny (Sedgwick 1935). If irony is taken in its broadest sense as a doubleness of meaning, where what is said is limited or undercut by what is implied, then we can start to include ironies that are not rhetorical, that have little to do with speech or language...
eBook - ePub- D. C. Muecke(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...I have taken being ironical to mean transmitting a literal message in such a way or in such a context as to challenge a response in the form of a correct interpretation of one’s intent, the transliteral meaning. In brief (Instrumental) Irony is an act, not simply a significance. Of writing that is designed to prevent interpretation in terms of intent one could use the word ‘irony’ only, it seems, as a synonym for ‘uncertainty’, that is as a word without any additional content and therefore redundant. The establishment in recent years in both France and America of Deconstructionist criticism based on a view of writing as, in the words of Jacques Derrida, ‘a structure cut off from any absolute responsibility or from consciousness as ultimate authority’ (Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics, London, 1975, p. 132) will probably lead to a recognition of the decreased usefulness to literary criticism of the term ‘irony’. It seems less likely that the usefulness of the term will delay the establishment of Deconstructionism or some related movement....
- Jan McAllister, James E. Miller(Authors)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
...As with metaphors, the interpretation of ironic utterances calls for a considerable amount of mental processing. We can think of irony as the speaker pretending to say something positive while intending something negative and the hearer going along with the pretence. Language users also have to learn to distinguish irony from sarcasm. Ironic comments are not intended to hurt other people's feelings, but may simply be intended to start a conversation or to shake up someone who is feeling down, as when a speaker, coming in out of wind and sleet, comments Wonderful weather this morning! or Nothing like a bit of healthy sleet to set you up for the day! Sarcastic comments, in contrast, are intended to affect others negatively, as when a lecturer says to a student handing in a very short essay several days late I see you're really excited by this topic, or when a parent comments to a son wearing some garish outfit Couldn't you have bought something brighter? Jokes are utterances that are intended to make the recipients laugh or chuckle and are not to be taken seriously. They may take the form of extended stories, such as the one cited by Lynn Truss about the panda that eats shoots and leaves (see Chapter 7). They may simply consist of one-liners produced off the cuff. The daughter of a friend of the second author was talking about her success at a game of Scrabble, when she had scored 30 points with the word sex. Quick as a flash her father said Nobody's ever given me 30 points for sex – much laughter, followed by a comment from his wife. Jokes can enliven lectures, especially impromptu one-liners. Sadly, it is said that 30 years on a group of students will remember none of the content of a lecture series but will remember any good jokes. In many clinical resources, this aspect of language is targeted in items that refer to ‘ literal ’ versus ‘i ndirect ’ meaning...
eBook - ePubIrony, Satire, Parody and the Grotesque in the Music of Shostakovich
A Theory of Musical Incongruities
- Esti Sheinberg(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...They all speak about 'saying one thing while meaning another', and all stress the aesthetic importance of a correct interpretation of the message by discovering the 'intended' or 'true' meaning behind the ostensible one. Quintilian, for example, stresses the importance of dissimulation and ambiguity in jests and humour, which he defines as irony: In eo vero genere, quo contraria osteriduntur, ironia est; illusionem vocant. Quae aut pronuntiatione intelligitur aut persona aut rei natura; nam, si qua earum verbis dissentit, apparet diversam esse orationi voluntatem. (Quintilian, Book VIII, 6, 54) On the other hand, that class of allegory in which the meaning is contrary to that suggested by the words, involves an element of irony, or, as our rhetoricians call it, illusion. This is made evident to the understanding either by the delivery, the character of the speaker or the nature of the subject. For if any of these three is out of keeping with the words, it at once becomes clear that the intention of the speaker is other than what he actually says. (Quintilian, 1922: 333) A very similar purport is offered by Douglas Muecke. According to him, the two levels of meaning and the contradictory relation between them are the structural traits of irony (Muecke, 1969: 14ff.). Wayne Booth speaks about the necessity of dissimulation, using other terms than Quintilian, but still bearing the same general idea, saying that 'recently the most popular metaphor has been that of seeing behind a mask or a "persona". In this view the reader is thought of as unmasking an eiron, or detecting behind a "mask-character" or persona the lineaments of the true speaker' (Booth, 1974: 33). One of the major traits of irony is its satirical function. In fact, Aristotle presents mockery as the main purport of irony, although he explains the reason for his evaluation of irony as being more 'gentlemanly' than buffoonery: 'ɛττι δ η ɛιρωνɛια της βωμoλoχιας ɛλɛυθɛριωτɛρoν...
eBook - ePub- Walter Nash(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...If these things are ironic, then literature thrives on irony; but the word then loses much of its technical content and becomes, like ‘beauty’ or ‘elegance’, an affective label. Dictionaries and books of reference are a little uneasy about its narrower import, as denoting a type of linguistic usage. The consensus appears to be this: that the ironist insincerely states something he does not mean, but through the manner of his statement – whether through its formulation, or its delivery, or both – is able to encode a counter-proposition, his ‘real meaning’, which may be interpreted by the attentive listener or reader. Irony is generally said to differ from sarcasm in this particular, that the sarcastic statement is ostensibly sincere, though it, too, is coded with some mark of peculiar emphasis. Following these guidelines, we may attempt to encode sarcastic and ironic expressions of the proposition Tommy is lazy. Sarcastically, it might be said that Tommy doesn ’ t strain himself ; ironically, that Tommy is renowned for his labours. The coding is the key to the distinction. Sarcasm uses a pro-code, that is, a form of words ostensibly equivalent in denotation to the parent proposition. Thus Tommy doesn ’ t strain himself, or Tommy likes to take it easy, or Tommy believes in working at a leisurely pace may be offered as tantamount to Tommy is lazy. They cannot be wholly tantamount, however, because apart from any consideration of philosophical entailments, the pro-code must involve a pejorative counter-code, expressing the speaker’s unsympathetic or hostile attitude. This counter-code may take the form of a fulsome intonation and vocal timbre (‘ Poor chap! He must be tired! What a shame!) or may depend on the operation of understatement and overstatement...
eBook - ePub- Louise Cummings(Author)
- 2010(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Still, testing the initial effect of a cluster of contextual factors, including their relative weight, might shed further light on the nature of irony interpretation. RACHEL GIORA See also : Autism spectrum disorders ; clinical pragmatics ; conventionality ; development, pragmatic ; experimental pragmatics ; explicit/implicit distinction ; humour ; inference ; inferential comprehension ; neuropragmatics ; pragmatic language impairment ; right-hemisphere damage and pragmatics ; schizophrenic language ; theory of mind ; traumatic brain injury and discourse Suggestions for further reading Barbe, K. (1995) Irony in Context, Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Gibbs, R.W. Jr and Colston, H.L. (eds) (2007) Irony in Language and Thought: A Cognitive Science Reader, New York and London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Martin, A.R. (2007) The Psychology of Humor: An Integrative Approach, Burlington, MA: Elsevier....
