Abstract

Irony at work in ill-humoured short articles
Langage et société n° 74, december 1995, pp. 5-46
Beyond a rhetorical analysis, irony is here contemplated in its enunciative and discursive dimension. The study of person markers in a corpus of short, caustic articles written up in the French press, shows that irony yields an enunciative system characterized by the splitting of the enunciation in two and by playing on subjective understanding and misunderstanding. From a discursive point of view, hypothesizing a specific ironic discourse shows that it favours the author and the reader's social positions, that it postulates power over other types of discourse and that, besides, it is founded on a nihilism close to the pleasure principle.

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