Cognitive modeling and irony

This chapter studies the role of the pragmatic notion of echo in creating ironic meaning. The notion of echo is treated as a cognitive operation rather than just a pragmatic task, which combines with other cognitive operations of at least two kinds: concept-building and inferential. The former operations include the creation of echoed and observed scenarios. The latter include the cancellation and addition of structure in an echoed scenario resulting from the contrast between the two scenarios. This account of irony, which is complementary of the one developed in Relevance Theory, allows us to trace the origin of the speaker’s attitudinal component in an ironic utterance to the underlying cognitive activity involving the cancellation of echoed assumptions within an inferential reasoning schema.