Cover not available

In:The Pragmatics of Irony and Banter
Edited by Manuel Jobert and Sandrine Sorlin
[Linguistic Approaches to Literature 30] 2018
► pp. 165–194

Get fulltext from our e-platform
JBE logo with link
PDF logo with download linkDownload Book PDF
authorization required

Chapter 9
Irony as counter positioning

Reader comments on the EU migrant crisis

 | Masaryk University, Brno
Published online: 25 April 2018
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/lal.30.09cho
Abstract
This chapter examines how ironic utterances in online news forums are used for the purpose of collective positioning of the commenting readers in opposition to other groups. Approaching irony as an act of echoic interpretation, the analysis focuses on how readers echo both the representations made by the media texts and the beliefs and ideologies presumed to be held by other social actors. It is argued that through irony, readers express their oppositional attitudes, disaffiliating themselves from the ironized social actors and their real or assumed representations. Simultaneously, ironists enforce their own opinions and standpoints, which are not just personal but – as argued in the paper – representative of a larger group to which the commenter belongs. By tracing how irony is used in reader comments to delegitimize dissonant views and emphasize contrastive self-positioning, this paper seeks to extend the application of an interactional pragmatic approach to irony by adding a critical discourse analytical dimension to it.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Online comments and discussion forums
  • 3.Data and analysis
    • 3.1Irony and echoic mention
      • 3.1.1 Echoic mention of primary media texts
      • 3.1.2 Echoic mention of non-media texts and intertextuality
    • 3.2Irony and categorization
      • 3.2.1Self-categorization
      • 3.2.2Other-categorization
      • 3.2.3Polarized categorization and intertextuality
    • 3.3Irony and fictionalization
  • 4.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Sources
  • References
References (63)
Sources
Už i Rakousko staví plot. Chce usměrnit proud běženců ze Slovinska . [Even Austria is building a fence. It wants to channel the flow of migrants from Slovenia]. idnes.cz, 13 November 2015. <[URL]> Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Rakušané v Alpách postaví 370 metrů dlouhý plot, Itálii se to nelíbí . [Austrians to build a 370-metre fence in the Alps, Italy does not like it]. idnes.cz, 27 April 2016. <[URL]> Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Prevence proti uprchlíkům. Rakousko chystá plot na hranicích s Maďarskem . [Prevention against refugees. Austria prepares a fence on borders with Hungary]. idnes.cz, 20 September 2016. <[URL]> Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
References
Alba-Juez, Laura & Attardo, Salvatore. 2014. The evaluative palette of verbal irony. In Evaluation in Context [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 242], Geoff Thompson & Laura Alba-Juez (eds), 93–116. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Attardo, Salvatore. 2000. Irony as relevant inappropriateness. Journal of Pragmatics 32(6): 793–826. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2001. Humorous Texts: A Semantic and Pragmatic Analysis. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2006. Irony. In Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, Keith Eward Brown (ed.). Oxford: Elsevier. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bakhtin, Mikhail M. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, Michael Holquist (ed.). Austin TX: University of Texas Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Burgers, Christian, van Mulken, Margot & Schellens, Peter Jan. 2011. Finding irony: An introduction of the Verbal Irony Procedure (VIP). Metaphor and Symbol 26(3): 186–205. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cap, Piotr. 2008. Towards the proximization model of the analysis of legitimization in political discourse. Journal of Pragmatics 40: 17–41. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2013. Proximization: The Pragmatics of Symbolic Distance Crossing [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 232]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Chovanec, Jan. 2010. Legitimation through differentiation: Discursive construction of Jacques Le Worm Chirac as an opponent to military action. In Perspectives in Politics and Discourse [Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 36], Urszula Okulska & Piotr Cap (eds), 61–81. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2012a. Conversational humour and joint fantasizing in online journalism. In Language and Humour in the Media, Jan Chovanec & Isabel Ermida (eds), 139–161. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2012b. Implicit meaning and racism in political advertising. In Discourse Interpretation: Approaches and Applications, Olga Dontcheva-Navratilova & Renata Povolná (eds), 55–77. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2017a. Participating with media. In The Routledge Handbook of Language and Media, Colleen Cotter & Daniel Perrin (eds), 505–522. London: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2017b. The othering of Roma migrants in British and Czech online news discussion forums. In Representing the Other in European Media Discourses [Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 74], Jan Chovanec & Katarzyna Molek-Kozakowska (eds), 235–258. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Chovanec, Jan & Molek-Kozakowska, Katarzyna (eds). 2017. Representing the Other in European Media Discourses [Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 74]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Clift, Rebecca. 1999. Irony in conversation. Language in Society 28: 528–553. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Dynel, Marta. 2014. Isn’t it ironic? Defining the scope of humorous irony. Humor 27(4): 619–639. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2017. The irony of irony: Irony based on truthfulness. Corpus Pragmatics 1(1): 3–36. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
El Refaie, Elisabeth. 2001. Metaphors we discriminate by: Naturalized themes in Austrian newspaper articles about asylum seekers. Journal of Sociolinguistics 5(3): 352–371. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2005. ‘Our purebred ethnic compatriots’: Irony in newspaper journalism. Journal of Pragmatics 37(6): 781–797. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ensink, Titus. 2012. Internet newspaper discussion lists. A virtual political arena? In Dialogue in Politics [Dialogue Studies 18], Lawrence N. Berlin & Anita Fetzer (eds), 21–65. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Fairclough, Norman. 1989. Language and Power. London: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1992. Discourse and Social Change. Cambridge: Polity.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Goodman, Simon & Rowe, Lottie. 2014. ‘Maybe it is prejudice… but it is NOT racism’: Negotiating racism in discussion forums about Gypsies. Discourse & Society 25(1): 32–46. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hardaker, Claire. 2010. Trolling in asynchronous computer-mediated communication: From user discussions to academic definitions. Journal of Politeness Research 6: 215–252. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Harré, Rom & Van Langenhove, Luk. 1999. Positioning Theory: Moral Contexts of Intentional Action. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hart, Christopher. 2010. Critical Discourse Analysis and Cognitive Science. New Perspectives on Immigration Discourse. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hartley, John. 1982. Understanding News. London: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Haugh, Michael & Chang, Wei-Lin Melody. 2015. Troubles talk, (dis)affiliation and the participation order in Taiwanese-Chinese online discussion boards. In Participation in Public and Social Media Interactions [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 256], Marta Dynel & Jan Chovanec (eds), 99–133. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hopkinson, Christopher. 2013. Trolling in online discussions: From provocation to community-building. Brno Studies in English 39(1): 5–25. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Johansson, Marjut. 2015. Bravo for this editorial! Users’ comments in discussion forums. In Follow-ups in Political Discourse [Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 60], Elda Weizman & Anita Fetzer (eds), 83–107. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kapogianni, Eleni. 2011. Irony via “surrealism”. In The Pragmatics of Humour across Discourse Domains [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 210], Marta Dynel (ed.), 51–68. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2016. The ironist’s intentions. Pragmatics & Cognition 23(1): 150–173. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kotthoff, Helga. 1999. Coherent keying in conversational humor: Contextualizing joint fictionalization. In Coherence in Spoken and Written Discourse. How to Create It and How to Describe It [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 63], Wolfram Bublitz, Uta Lenk & Ejia Ventola (eds), 125–150. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2003. Responding to irony in different contexts: On cognition in conversation. Journal of Pragmatics 35(9): 1387–1411. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Laineste, Liisi. 2013. Funny or aggressive? Failed humour in internet comments. Folklore: Electronic Journal of Folklore 53: 29–46. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2017. Othering in Estonian online discussions about refugees. In Representing the Other in European Media Discourses [Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 74], Jan Chovanec & Katarzyna Molek-Kozakowska (eds), 281–304. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Livnat, Zohar & Dori-Haconen, Gonen. 2013. The effect of irony in radio talk-back programmes in Israel. In Fetzer (ed.), 193–218. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Moghaddam, Fathali & Harré, Rom. 2010. Words, conflicts and political processes. In Words of Conflict, Words of War: How the Language We Use in Political Processes Sparks Fighting, Fathali Moghaddam & Rom Harré (eds), 1–27. Santa Barbara CA: Praeger.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Molek-Kozakowska, Katarzyna & Chovanec, Jan. 2017. Media representations of the ‘other’ Europeans: Common themes and points of divergence. In Representing the Other in European Media Discourses [Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 74], Jan Chovanec & Katarzyna Molek-Kozakowska (eds), 1–22. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Musolff, Andreas. 2010. Metaphor, Nation and the Holocaust: The Concept of the Body Politic. London: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Partington, Alan. 2006. The Linguistics of Laughter. A corpus-assisted study of laughter-talk. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2007. Irony and reversal of evaluation. Journal of Pragmatics 39(3): 1547–1569. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Reisigl, Martin & Wodak, Ruth. 2001. Discourse and Discrimination: Rhetorics of Racism and Anti-semitism. London: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Santa Ana, Otto. 1999. ‘Like an animal I was treated’: Anti-immigrant metaphor in US public discourse. Discourse & Society 10(2): 191–224. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Shilikhina, Ksenia. 2018. Discourse markers as guides to understanding spontaneous humor and irony. InThe Dynamics of Interactional Humor: Creating and Negotiating Humor in Everyday Encounters [Topics in Humor Research 7], Villy Tsakona & Jan Chovanec (eds), 57–75. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Stallone, Letícia & Haugh, Michael. 2016. Joint fantasising as relational practice in Brazilian Portuguese interactions. Language & Communication 55: 10–23. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2018. Online joint fictionalization. In The Dynamics of Interactional Humor: Creating and Negotiating Humor in Everyday Encounters [Topics in Humor Research 7], Villy Tsakona & Jan Chovanec (eds), 229–255. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Tsakona, Villy & Chovanec, Jan. 2018. The Dynamics of Interactional Humor: Creating and Negotiating Humor in Everyday Encounters [Topics in Humor Research 7]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
van Dijk, Teun. 1998. Opinions and ideologies in the press. In Approaches to Media Discourse, Allan Bell & Peter Garrett (eds), 21–63. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
van Leeuwen, Theo. 2007. Legitimation in discourse and communication. Discourse and Communication 1: 91–112. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2015. Irony in and through follow-ups: Talk and meta-talk in online commenting in the Israeli context. In The Dynamics of Political Discourse: Forms and Functions of Follow-ups [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 259], Anita Fetzer, Elda Weizman & Lawrence N. Berlin (eds), 173–195. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Wilson, Deirdre. 2006. The pragmatics of verbal irony: Echo or pretence? Lingua 116(10): 1722–1743. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Wirth-Koliba, Victoria. 2016. The diverse and dynamic world of ‘us’ and ‘them’ in political discourse. Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis across Disciplines 8(1): 23–37.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Wodak, Ruth. 2001. The discourse-historical approach. In Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis, Ruth Wodak & Michael Meyer (eds), 63–94. London: Sage. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2011. Suppression of the Nazi past, coded languages, and discourses of silence: Applying the discourse-historical approach to post-war anti-semitism in Austria. In Political Languages in the Age of Extremes, Willibald Steinmetz (ed.), 351–379. Oxford: OUP.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2015. The Politics of Fear: What Right-Wing Populist Discourses Mean. London: Sage. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Wodak, Ruth, de Cillia, Rudolf, Reisigl, Martin & Liebhart, Karin. 1999. The Discursive Construction of National Identity. Edinburgh: EUP.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cited by (12)

Cited by 12 other publications

Chovanec, Jan & Villy Tsakona
2023. “The girl is on fire!”. In The Pragmatics of Humour in Interactive Contexts [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 335], ► pp. 87 ff. DOI logo
Yus, Francisco
2023. Humour on Social Networking Sites. In Pragmatics of Internet Humour, ► pp. 189 ff. DOI logo
Yus, Francisco
2023. Inferring Irony Online. In The Cambridge Handbook of Irony and Thought, ► pp. 160 ff. DOI logo
Heuman, Anna
2021. Acceptable Language Online: Negotiating the Impact of Digital Affordances. In Analyzing Digital Discourses, ► pp. 163 ff. DOI logo
Baider, Fabienne & Maria Constantinou
2020. Covert hate speech. Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict 8:2 ► pp. 262 ff. DOI logo
Baider, Fabienne H.
2019. Le discours de haine dissimulée : le mépris pour humilier. Déviance et Société Vol. 43:3 ► pp. 359 ff. DOI logo
Chovanec, Jan
2019. Multimodal storytelling in the news: Sequenced images as ideological scripts of othering. Discourse, Context & Media 28 ► pp. 8 ff. DOI logo
Chovanec, Jan
2023. ‘Bigger than football’: racist talk on and off the soccer pitch. Soccer & Society 24:7 ► pp. 942 ff. DOI logo
Chovanec, Jan
2023. Negotiating Hate and Conflict in Online Comments: Evidence from the NETLANG Corpus. In Hate Speech in Social Media, ► pp. 341 ff. DOI logo
Statham, Simon & Rocío Montoro
2019. The year’s work in stylistics 2018. Language and Literature: International Journal of Stylistics 28:4 ► pp. 354 ff. DOI logo
Molek-Kozakowska, Katarzyna & Jan Chovanec
2017. Media representations of the “other” Europeans. In Representing the other in European media discourses [Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture, 74], ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
[no author supplied]
2023. Irony in Linguistic Communication. In The Cambridge Handbook of Irony and Thought, ► pp. 129 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 25 november 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

Mobile Menu Logo with link to supplementary files background Layer 1 prag Twitter_Logo_Blue