Dr Eleni Kapogianni, from the Department of English Language & Linguistics, has just published an article in the January 2016 issue of the Journal of Pragmatics entitled ‘The Ironic Operation: Revisiting the Components of Ironic Meaning’, pp.16-28.

The Journal of Pragmatics is a peer-reviewed journal, established in 1977, currently published by Elsevier.

Eleni’s article analyses verbal irony as an operation that takes some element related to the literal meaning as its input and results in both a direct output and multiple indirect (implicated) outputs. Her observations, based on a corpus of real-life examples of ironic exchanges, also highlight the differences between the ‘ironic vehicle’ (i.e. the unit of meaning that is used in an ironic way) and the unit on which irony operates (‘ironic input’). Her discussion highlights the advantages of viewing irony as an operation and proposes a new model of analysis for this phenomenon.

To access the article, please see the open access page on ScienceDirect:
www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378216615003069