Abstract

This paper examines the ironic speaker’s intentions, drawing distinctions on the basis of two criteria: communicative priority and manifestness. It is argued that these provide useful insights into the widely discussed categories of speaker’s intentions. First of all, “ironic meaning” is viewed as comprising a set of different types of meaning, including a bundle of implicatures that can be hierarchically ranked in terms of both communicative priority and inferential priority. Secondly, examples of different degrees of manifestness of the ironist’s intentions are discussed in light of the communicative complexities of irony, which is viewed as a higher-order phenomenon. The final discussion attempts to bring together the analyses of the speaker’s and the hearer’s perspectives, contributing to a dynamic model of ironic discourse.