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PaSTY talk - Characterising irony - Steven Pattison

Date: 6 March 2013 Time: 5.00-6.00 pm

Venue: Bowland North, SR 1

Irony appears in many contexts and is produced using a range of linguistic forms and other devices. As a result of this, and a tendency to conflate irony with its weaker counterpart, the adjective ironic, definitions of irony have tended to accommodate some examples that may not be irony at all. To address this loosening of the constraints on what counts as straightforward irony, I have adopted a systematic approach to characterising examples that I have collected together in a database of irony. I will explain the approach I am taking, which involves testing the examples against a set of hypotheses through the use of a range of analytical tools such as Levinson's (2000) Q- I- and M-Principles, schema theory, Cruse & Croft's work on antonyms, and so on. After demonstrating my approach to characterising irony by analysing one or two examples, we will then break into small groups to discuss the analysis of one or two further examples from the database and the implications, if any, for the characterization of irony.

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Who can attend: Anyone