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The Clash: Humor and critical attitude in verbal irony

Abstract Many pragmatic accounts of irony were proposed over the last decades. The best known may be the Gricean approach (Grice 1989a, 1989b), the echoic account (Sperber and Wilson 1981, 1995 [1986]; Wilson 2006, 2009) and the pretense theory (Clark and Gerrig 1984). These approaches state that irony consists in communicating the opposite, echoing or pretending, respectively. My aim here is to show that what defines verbal irony is something subtler: an overt clash between contents is the only thing that we shall find in every ironic utterance. On a different level, the relationships between irony and criticism on the one hand, and irony and humor on the other, have also been of great interest to authors working in the field. Different positions are defended regarding these two issues: here I will claim that criticism is an essential condition for ironic utterances, whereas humor is a consequence of some basic characteristics of irony.