ABSTRACT
Irony is an ambivalent type of speech, which creates distance from itself and leaves the recipient unsure whether or to what degree the speaker assumes responsibility for the words he or she utters. In their book on Relevance, Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson describe irony as a second-order phenomenon, the interpretive representation of an existing representation. According to Herbert Clark and Richard Gerrig, quotations can be regarded as demonstrations of pre-existing utterances. Demonstrations depict their referents from a certain vantage point, and they contain a number of elements, such as the demonstrator's running commentary or the absence of a real racket. Sperber argues, indirect speech does not always allow to draw a sharp line between the diegetic and the mimetic, the framing and the embedded discourse, the reporting and the reported speech. Sperber and Wilson have characterised verbal irony as a form of 'echoic utterance'. An echoic utterance is a subcategory of interpretive utterances.
