Irony's discoursive strategies in Portuguese parliamentary debate

In this paper we study the discursive strategies that underlie the use of irony in parliamentary Portuguese debate during the second legislative session (2010-2011) of the XIth legislature (2009-2011). We try to answer the question "Which discursive strategies irony makes use of and what are their illocutionary goals and perlocutionary effects ?". For this purpose, we make use of different theories (particularly the politeness theory - Brown & Levinson, 1987 and Kerbrat-Orecchioni, 2005 et 2010 -, discourse modalisation and modalities as seen by Bernard Pottier's semantic theory, 2011[1992] and 2012, and Ducrot's discursive polyphony, 1984) that jointly contribute to a deeper comprehension of the object under analysis.