Test of the Mention Theory of Irony

The traditional theory of irony, which assumes that an ironist uses a figurative meaning opposite to the literal meaning of the utterance, is shown to be inadequate; an alternative theory is presented, which assumes that the ironist mentions the literal meaning of the utterance and expresses an attitude toward it. Although the implications for understanding irony are difficult to test, the two theories do make testable predictions about the conditions under which irony is perceived: The mention theory requires antecedent material for the ironist to mention, whereas the standard theory does not. A reading comprehension test was conducted involving anecdotes that satisfied the traditional criterion for irony but could include or omit antecedents for echoic mention. Results favored the mention theory of irony. Metaphor and irony, the two most important tropes, have been discussed by rhetoricians and literary scholars for more than 2 millennia. Both are common in everyday speech: It is equally unsurprising, for instance, to hear an objectionable person called "a rat" metaphorically or "a nice guy" ironically. Yet metaphor has become a popular topic in psycholinguistics (Ortony, 1979), whereas irony has been neglected. Two considerations might help to explain this imbalance: It has been easier to conceive experimental approaches to metaphor, and the relevance of metaphor to broader psychological issues has been more apparent. Our aim in this article is to illustrate one way in which irony is amenable to experimental treatment and to test a recent theory of irony put forward by Sperber and Wilson (1981), which, if correct, should increase the psychological pertinence of the study of irony.