Means of expressing irony in online discourse

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Myers notices that “Irony is a little bit like the weather: we all know it’s there, but so far nobody has done much about it” (Myers, 1977). A substantial body of research has been done since then in the fields of Psychology, Linguistics, Media Studies and Computer Science to explain the phenomenon of sarcasm and irony. Several attempts have been made to create computational models of irony (Littman and Mey, 1991). Harald Weinrich refers to “a standard elementary model of irony” (Weinrich, 1966: 271). This model is developed from the dialogues of Plato, in which the speaker (Socrates) carries on a conversation with the listener (his ‘opponent’), while the curious audience listens to the conversation. According to this pattern, the ‘victims’ of the irony often become those who are unable to understand the true meaning of ironic utterances, i.e. the opponents of Socrates. Today this view is not widely shared among researchers, since in most cases the aim of criticism expressed ironically is to make the audience understand the disapproval. Similarly, Michael Clyne, an Australian linguist and scholar, also believed that a “victim” of irony is not aware of implicit meaning of the utterance (Clyne, 1975: 23). However, Clyne was the first who designated a mismatch between different levels of communication as a constitutive feature of irony and also pointed out the need for “nonlinguistic information” (knowledge about the world, context, particular situation, etc.), without which perception of irony is impossible.