Dirk Geeraerts, University of Leuven

Irony is arguably one of the most intriguing communicative phenomena: why would anyone say something to convey a message that is in a crucial sense the opposite of what is literally expressed? And how is it that the concept of 'irony' does not only refer to verbal irony, but extends to phenomena that lie outside the field of linguistics: socratic irony, dramatic irony, romantic irony, situational irony? In this course, I will argue that an insightful analysis of irony and its diversity can be achieved if we combine the notion of higher-order mind-reading (which regularly appears in post-Gricean pragmatic approaches to irony) with a number of ideas that loom large in cognitive semantics: the prototype-based structure of categories, the importance of conceptual construal, and the fundamentally intersubjective nature of language.