Verbal irony as implicit display of ironic environment: Distinguishing ironic utterances from nonirony

This paper proposes an implicit display theory of verbal irony in order to provide a plausible explanation of how irony is distinguished from nonirony. The implicit display theory claims that verbal irony is an utterance or a statement that implicitly displays ironic environment, a proper situational setting in the discourse context, and that verbal irony is a prototype-based category. The notion of implicit display provides typicality conditions characterizing the prototype of verbal irony; the similarity between the prototype and an utterance is formulated as the degree of ironicalness. In order for an utterance to be interpreted ironically, the utterance must be recognized as achieving implicit display through the process of assessing the degree of ironicalness, and the discourse situation must be identified as ironic environment through the process of checking or inferring its constituent events/states. If these two criteria are satisfied, the utterance is judged to be ironic, otherwise it is judged to be non-ironic. This paper also argues that the implicit display theory overcomes several difficulties of the existing irony studies and that it is consistent with the empirical findings from psycholinguistics. These arguments indicate that the implicit display theory is a more adequate and comprehensive theory of verbal irony than the traditional pragmatic theory, the echoic interpretation theory, the pretense theory, and other theories. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.