Abstract

The article provides a criticism of the traditional view of irony. First, an outline of the model will be presented, placing particular emphasis on one of its key assumptions that when irony is understood, the ironist means the opposite of what he says.

The paper evaluates the above supposition by providing examples of irony in which the opposite of the speaker's meaning could be interpreted in terms of two different types of negation: predicate and propositional.

In conclusion, I propose that it might be impossible to define the exact opposite of what a speaker says. Thus, the traditional view of irony is incomplete and should be treated with precaution.

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