1.Introduction

Contentions about verbal irony as a subject of intellectual inquiry have increased in the last three decades and many strands of the notion have emerged, especially in the pragmatics literature (Simpson 2011Simpson, Paul 2011 “ ‘It’s Not Ironic, That’s Just Stupid:’ Towards an Eclectic Account of the Discourse of Irony.” In The Pragmatics of Humour across Discourse Domains, ed. by Marta Dynel, 33–50. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. ). Numerous labels for the various strands of the notion have evolved and so have detailed explanations based on the authors’ theoretical orientations and intuitions. For example, verbal irony may now be seen as an overt untruthfulness (Grice 1989Grice, Paul H. 1989 Studies in the Way of Words. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.), as pretense (Clark and Gerrig 1984Clark, Herbert, and Richard Gerrig 1984 “On the Pretence Theory of Irony.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 113: 121–126. ), as relevant inappropriateness (Attardo 2000Attardo, Salvatore 2000 “Irony as Relevant Inappropriateness.” Journal of Pragmatics 32, 9–16. ), as an implicit display (Utsumi 2000Utsumi, Akira 2000 “Verbal Irony as Implicit Display of Ironic Environment: Distinguishing Ironic Utterances from Non Irony”. Journal of Pragmatics 32: 1777–1806. ), as a pragmatic insincerity or ‘allusional pretense’ (Kumon-Nakamura et al. 1995Kumon-Nakamura, Sachi, Sam Glucksberg, and Mary Brown 1995 “How About Another Piece of Pie: The Allusional Pretense Theory of Discourse Irony.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 124: 2–21), as a reversal of evaluation (Partington 2007Partington, Alan 2007 “Irony and the Reversal of Evaluation.” Journal of Pragmatics 39: 1547–1569. ), as a non-deliberate act (Gibbs 2012Gibbs, Raymond 2012 “Are Ironic Acts Deliberate?” Journal of Pragmatics 44: 104–115. ), as critical (Garmendia 2000Garmendia, Joana 2000 “Irony is Critical.” Pragmatics and Cognition 18: 397–421. , 2018Garmendia, Joana 2018 Irony. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ), as simply echoic (Sperber and Wilson 1981Sperber, Dan, and Deirdre Wilson 1981 “Irony and the Use-Mention Distribution.” In Radical Pragmatics, ed. by Peter Cole, 295–318. New York: Academic.), or as both pretense and echoic at the same time (Papa-Wyatt 2014Papa-Wyatt, Michaela 2014 “Pretense and Echo: Towards an Integrated Account of Verbal Irony.” International Review of Pragmatics 5: 127–168. ). This list is not exhaustive.

The problem, however, is that most of the studies so far have been based on native speakers’ contexts, and as such, research on deeply entrenched cultural consciousness that motivates irony in nonnative settings is missing. In addition, examples in these studies are mostly invented and decontextualised, and are based on the analyst’s intuitions, biases or theoretical persuasions (Simpson 2011Simpson, Paul 2011 “ ‘It’s Not Ironic, That’s Just Stupid:’ Towards an Eclectic Account of the Discourse of Irony.” In The Pragmatics of Humour across Discourse Domains, ed. by Marta Dynel, 33–50. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. ; Noveck and Sperber 2012Noveck, Ira, and Dan Sperber 2012 “The Way and How of Experimental Pragmatics: The Case of Scalar Inferences.” In Relevance and Meaning, ed. by Deidre Wilson, and Dan Sperber, 307–330. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ). There is need, therefore, for an approach that privileges the linguistic and socio-cultural consciousness of a people in the production and interpretation of verbal irony. Even then, as Boutonnet (2009Boutonnet, Josiane 2009 “Irony: Stylistic Approaches.” In Concise Encyclopaedia of Pragmatics, ed. by Jacob L. Mey, 408–411. Oxford: Elsevier., 410) contends, “no absolute agreement can ever be reached about incidences of irony and their interpretation, as usage as well as interpretations are rooted in the social and linguistic conventions of a particular speech community at a specific point in time.” Bearing this in mind, and using authentic data from Nigeria, this study presents a special subset of ironic phenomena that draws largely from Sperber and Wilson’s echoic account but deviates from it in very significant ways. The study argues that, although verbal irony in the Nigerian context could be described as echoic, it lacks some of the properties said to be inherent in the echoic account. By questioning these properties, the study attempts to remodel the echoic account to accommodate what is essentially cultural in the production, perception, and interpretation of irony in the Nigerian context, thus providing a perspective not previously accounted for in the literature.

Consequently, the study will attempt to identify the main sources of ironic utterances among Nigerians, and show the prevalence of these ironic types, including how the culture of the Nigerian people, their belief systems, and worldview condition the use of irony in different contexts of interaction. The study will also explain what elements of the echoic account of irony are missing in the Nigerian context, and suggest the implication of the use of these forms of irony in a theory of verbal communication. This paper is organized as follows. First, a brief review of scholarship on irony is presented, followed by a summary of the relevance-theoretic echoic account and a brief background of the Nigerian cultural context. Materials and methods, data presentation and analysis come next. The last section deals with summary of findings and concluding remarks.

2.Notions of irony

Irony has enjoyed enormous attention among scholars since Classical antiquity. In rhetorical and classical studies over the years, the term has been applied to an array of related phenomena ranging from Socratic irony, situational irony, dramatic irony, Romantic irony, cosmic irony, irony of fate, to verbal irony including different forms of parody, wit, and humour (Sperber and Wilson 1998Sperber, Dan, and Deirdre Wilson 1998 “Irony and Relevance: A Reply to Seto, Hamamoto and Yamanoshi.” In Relevance Theory: Applications and Implications, ed. by Robyn Carston, and Seiji Uchida, 283–193. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. ; Attardo 2000Attardo, Salvatore 2000 “Irony as Relevant Inappropriateness.” Journal of Pragmatics 32, 9–16. ; Curcó 2002Curcó, Carmen 2002 “Irony: Negation, Echo and Metarepresentation.” Lingua 110: 257–280. ; Yus 2003Yus, Francisco 2003 “Humour and the Search for Relevance.” Journal of Pragmatics 25: 1295–1331. ; Abrams and Harpham 2005Abrams, Meyer H., and Geoffrey G. Harpham 2005 A Glossary of Literary Terms. Boston: Wadsworth.). Whether in linguistics, rhetoric or literary studies, the nature, meaning, and uses of irony have been contentious, although many scholars seem to share the notion that the basic or constitutive element of irony is semantic reversal (Dynel 2013Dynel, Marta 2013 “Irony from a Neo-Gricean Perspective: On Untruthfulness and Evaluative Implicature.” Intercultural Pragmatics 10 (3): 403–431. ). That is to say, the speaker of an ironic utterance simply wants the hearer to take the opposite of what is said as the intended meaning. Colebrook (2004Colebrooks, Claire 2004 Irony. London: Routledge. , 1) says “irony has a frequent and common definition: saying what is contrary to what is meant.” Or, put differently, “verbal irony is typically the expression of an attitude that is in opposition with the true state of affairs” (Kreuz and Link 2002Kreuz, Roger J., and Christine E. Link 2002 “Asymmetries in the Use of Verbal Irony.” Journal of Language and Social Psychology 21 (2): 127–143. , 127). Further, irony is said to arise when “an already held piece of ‘evidence’ clashes with observed contradictory scenario” (Ruiz de Mendoza and Lozano-Palacio 2019Ruiz de Mendoza, Francisco J., and Ines Lozano-Palecio 2019 “A Cognitive-linguistic Approach to Complexity in Irony: Dissecting the Ironic Echo.” Metaphor and Symbol 34 (2): 127–138. , 127).

In the Gricean programme, irony is said to flout the maxim of Quality to implicate the opposite of what is said. It is a form of pretense, for the speaker “makes-as-if to say” what is uttered, the outcome of which is contradictory; for example, a speaker calls X who has just betrayed him, a fine friend (Grice 1989Grice, Paul H. 1989 Studies in the Way of Words. Cambridge: Harvard University Press., 34). For Gibbs (2012Gibbs, Raymond 2012 “Are Ironic Acts Deliberate?” Journal of Pragmatics 44: 104–115. , 108-109), “the entire point of ironic language is to express an evaluative judgement about the target.” Dynel (2013Dynel, Marta 2013 “Irony from a Neo-Gricean Perspective: On Untruthfulness and Evaluative Implicature.” Intercultural Pragmatics 10 (3): 403–431. , 403), who defends the Gricean position, sees irony as reversal, inversion, negation, opposition or contradiction of meaning and she says “evaluation is the second definitional component of irony, next to flouting the maxim of Quality, which promotes untruthfulness.” But as Partington (2007Partington, Alan 2007 “Irony and the Reversal of Evaluation.” Journal of Pragmatics 39: 1547–1569. , 1565) has observed, “irony consists in the reversal of evaluation which is in most part critical.” Unlike the Gricean position, however, he maintains that the ironic criticism need not be hostile as irony could be affiliative, as when it binds both speaker and listener together when the object of the irony is a third party.

Following from Grice too, some see irony as involving pretense (Clark and Gerrig 1984Clark, Herbert, and Richard Gerrig 1984 “On the Pretence Theory of Irony.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 113: 121–126. ). They argue that the ironist does not particularly perform a speech act such as asserting or questioning, but only pretends to do so, and in the process, conveys a mocking attitude towards the speech act. In the same way, Recanati (2004)Recanati, Francois 2004 Literal Meaning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. sees both irony and free indirect speech as tacitly attributive varieties of pretense. According to him, “the act of assertion is precisely what the speaker does not perform when she says that p ironically: rather, she plays someone else’s part and mimics an act of assertion accomplished by the person” (Recanati 2004Recanati, Francois 2004 Literal Meaning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press., 223). A variety of the pretense account is also given by Currie (2006)Currie, Gregory 2006 “Why Irony is Pretense.” In The Architecture of the Imagination, ed. by Shaun Nichols, 111–133. Oxford: Oxford University Press. . This involves incorporating a tacitly attributive element. In irony, the performer of an action only pretends to do so with the aim of targeting “a restrictive or otherwise defective view of the world” (Currie 2006Currie, Gregory 2006 “Why Irony is Pretense.” In The Architecture of the Imagination, ed. by Shaun Nichols, 111–133. Oxford: Oxford University Press. , 116). While pretending to perform an act, the speaker simultaneously expresses a mocking or sceptical attitude to the attributed utterance or thought. Irony has also been described as a non-deliberate act, but something that simply “emerges from the interaction of multiple constraints that operate simultaneously in any moment of human experience” (Gibbs 2012Gibbs, Raymond 2012 “Are Ironic Acts Deliberate?” Journal of Pragmatics 44: 104–115. , 104). Gibbs argues that the sheer speed with which people produce and comprehend ironic acts is an indication of its spontaneity. In other words, the production and perception of ironic messages are so fast that they cannot be dependent on a conscious reflection either by the speaker or listener.

3.The echoic interpretation of irony

Relevance theorists describe verbal irony as echoic unlike the Classical and Gricean notions that see irony as mere a semantic reversal (Sperber and Wilson 1981Sperber, Dan, and Deirdre Wilson 1981 “Irony and the Use-Mention Distribution.” In Radical Pragmatics, ed. by Peter Cole, 295–318. New York: Academic.; Wilson and Sperber 2012Wilson, Deirdre, and Dan Sperber 2012 “Explaining Irony.” In Meaning and Relevance, ed. by Deidre Wilson, and Dan Sperber, 124–145. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ; Wilson 2013Wilson, Deirdre 2013 “Irony Comprehension: A Developmental Perspective.” Journal of Pragmatics 59: 40–56. , 2017Wilson, Deirdre 2017 “Irony, Hyperbole, Jokes and Banter.” In Formal Models in the Study of Language: Applications in Interdisciplinary Contexts, ed. by Joanna Blochowiak, Cristina Girsot, Stephania Durriemann, and Christopher Laenzlinger, 201–220. New York: Springer. ). Wilson and Sperber (2012Wilson, Deirdre, and Dan Sperber 2012 “Explaining Irony.” In Meaning and Relevance, ed. by Deidre Wilson, and Dan Sperber, 124–145. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. , 125) argue that although “an ironical utterance typically implies that the speaker believes the opposite of what was said […] this is neither the meaning nor the point of the utterance.” They present the echoic account as the best explanation of the meaning and motivation for verbal irony. On this account, irony is an echo of an attributed thought which tacitly expresses a dissociative attitude to the echoed content. Irony is evaluative and often has a normative bias. They argue that since it is a common experience to find that situations, events or performances do not generally live up to some norm-based expectation, the aim of the ironical utterance is to complain or criticise those situations. Specifically, relevance defines echoic use as a “subtype of attributed use in which the speaker’s primary intention is not to provide information about the content of an attributed thought, but to convey her own attitude or reaction to that thought” (Wilson and Sperber 2012Wilson, Deirdre, and Dan Sperber 2012 “Explaining Irony.” In Meaning and Relevance, ed. by Deidre Wilson, and Dan Sperber, 124–145. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. , 129). Such attitudes may be one of mockery, contempt or scorn (Wilson 2018Wilson, Deirdre 2018 “Relevance Theory and Literary Interpretation.” In Reading Beyond the Code: Literature and Relevance Theory, ed. by Terence Cave, and Deidre Wilson, 185–204. Oxford: Oxford University Press.). The speaker may, in fact, be puzzled, angry, amused, intrigued or sceptical. On this account, anything can be echoed, including traditions, popular beliefs, assumptions, and even personal thoughts (Sperber and Wilson 1995Sperber, Dan, and Deirdre Wilson 1995 Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Oxford: Blackwell.; Wilson 2013Wilson, Deirdre 2013 “Irony Comprehension: A Developmental Perspective.” Journal of Pragmatics 59: 40–56. , 2017Wilson, Deirdre 2017 “Irony, Hyperbole, Jokes and Banter.” In Formal Models in the Study of Language: Applications in Interdisciplinary Contexts, ed. by Joanna Blochowiak, Cristina Girsot, Stephania Durriemann, and Christopher Laenzlinger, 201–220. New York: Springer. ).

On the relevance account, the utterance, “see what lovely weather it is” (when rain is pouring down) can only be successful as an irony if seen against the background of some recognisable person or type of person (or people in general) who had entertained the thought or said the weather would be good on a particular day and time. In the same way, Grice’s (1989Grice, Paul H. 1989 Studies in the Way of Words. Cambridge: Harvard University Press., 53) example “Look, that car has all its windows intact” (when the windows have all been badly broken) can only be a successful irony, as Wilson and Sperber explain, if seen against the background of some recognisable person or persons who had entertained or are entertaining the thought – for example, that in a particular city or town all cars have their windows intact.

Three distinctive features are identifiable on this account. They include the ironical attitude, a normative bias, and an ironical tone of voice (Wilson and Sperber 2012Wilson, Deirdre, and Dan Sperber 2012 “Explaining Irony.” In Meaning and Relevance, ed. by Deidre Wilson, and Dan Sperber, 124–145. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ; Wilson 2017Wilson, Deirdre 2017 “Irony, Hyperbole, Jokes and Banter.” In Formal Models in the Study of Language: Applications in Interdisciplinary Contexts, ed. by Joanna Blochowiak, Cristina Girsot, Stephania Durriemann, and Christopher Laenzlinger, 201–220. New York: Springer. ). First, the ironic attitude, which could be mocking, scornful or contemptuous. In relevance, this attitude is said to be “primarily to a thought (e.g. a belief, a wish, a hope, a norm-based expectation) that the speaker attributes to some person or group, or to people in general, and which the speaker regards as ludicrously false or inadequate in the circumstances” (Wilson 2017Wilson, Deirdre 2017 “Irony, Hyperbole, Jokes and Banter.” In Formal Models in the Study of Language: Applications in Interdisciplinary Contexts, ed. by Joanna Blochowiak, Cristina Girsot, Stephania Durriemann, and Christopher Laenzlinger, 201–220. New York: Springer. , 209). Next, irony is said to have a normative bias. This means that the primary aim of irony is to criticise or complain about the violation of a norm-based expectation. Finally, irony is said to have an ironic tone of voice. This is in the form of flat or deadpan intonation. It is often slower in tempo and has a “lower pitch level and intensity than are found in corresponding literal utterances” (Wilson 2017Wilson, Deirdre 2017 “Irony, Hyperbole, Jokes and Banter.” In Formal Models in the Study of Language: Applications in Interdisciplinary Contexts, ed. by Joanna Blochowiak, Cristina Girsot, Stephania Durriemann, and Christopher Laenzlinger, 201–220. New York: Springer. , 214). The so-called ironic tone of voice is generally seen as a cue to the speaker’s attitude towards the echoed content; that is, a mocking, sneering or contemptuous attitude. The echoic account has been seriously criticised (Clark and Gerrig 1984Clark, Herbert, and Richard Gerrig 1984 “On the Pretence Theory of Irony.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 113: 121–126. ; Toolan 1996Toolan, Michael 1996 Total Speech: An Integrational Linguistic Approach to Language. Durham and London: Duke University Press.; Utsumi 2000Utsumi, Akira 2000 “Verbal Irony as Implicit Display of Ironic Environment: Distinguishing Ironic Utterances from Non Irony”. Journal of Pragmatics 32: 1777–1806. ; Simpson 2011Simpson, Paul 2011 “ ‘It’s Not Ironic, That’s Just Stupid:’ Towards an Eclectic Account of the Discourse of Irony.” In The Pragmatics of Humour across Discourse Domains, ed. by Marta Dynel, 33–50. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. ; Dynel 2013Dynel, Marta 2013 “Irony from a Neo-Gricean Perspective: On Untruthfulness and Evaluative Implicature.” Intercultural Pragmatics 10 (3): 403–431. ). Clark and Gerrig (1984)Clark, Herbert, and Richard Gerrig 1984 “On the Pretence Theory of Irony.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 113: 121–126. , for instance, argue that, in the echoic account, what is a possible implicit echo and what is not cannot be easily determined. Dynel (2013)Dynel, Marta 2013 “Irony from a Neo-Gricean Perspective: On Untruthfulness and Evaluative Implicature.” Intercultural Pragmatics 10 (3): 403–431. attacks the relevance position as a replacement of the Gricean notion. She says the relevance approach is “ill-advised” and “unfounded” (Dynel 2013Dynel, Marta 2013 “Irony from a Neo-Gricean Perspective: On Untruthfulness and Evaluative Implicature.” Intercultural Pragmatics 10 (3): 403–431. , 407). Also, while Simpson (2011)Simpson, Paul 2011 “ ‘It’s Not Ironic, That’s Just Stupid:’ Towards an Eclectic Account of the Discourse of Irony.” In The Pragmatics of Humour across Discourse Domains, ed. by Marta Dynel, 33–50. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. concedes that the echoic interpretation of irony is quite insightful, he believes it does not apply to all ironic utterances. He describes the discourse contexts presented by Sperber and Wilson as “highly speculative” (Simpson 2011Simpson, Paul 2011 “ ‘It’s Not Ironic, That’s Just Stupid:’ Towards an Eclectic Account of the Discourse of Irony.” In The Pragmatics of Humour across Discourse Domains, ed. by Marta Dynel, 33–50. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. , 37). Relevance theorists have, however, put up a strong defence of the echoic interpretation (see Sperber and Wilson 1998Sperber, Dan, and Deirdre Wilson 1998 “Irony and Relevance: A Reply to Seto, Hamamoto and Yamanoshi.” In Relevance Theory: Applications and Implications, ed. by Robyn Carston, and Seiji Uchida, 283–193. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. ; Wilson 1998Wilson, Deirdre 1998 “Discourse, Coherence and Relevance: A Reply to Rechel Giora.” Journal of Pragmatics 29: 57–74. , 2006Wilson, Deirdre 2006 “The Pragmatics of Verbal Irony: Echo or Pretence?” Lingua 116: 1722–1743. ).

4.The Nigerian cultural context and the echoic account

Irony occurs in the context of culture; perhaps more importantly, it is determined, conditioned, and motivated by cultural sensibilities. But culture itself is not easy to define. Spencer-Oatey (2000)Spencer-Oatey, Helen D. 2000 “Rapport Management: A Framework for Analysis.” In Culturally Speaking: Managing Rapport through Talk across Cultures, ed. by Helen D. Spencer-Oatey, 11–46. London: Continuum. explains culture as some indistinct or vague set of attitudes, beliefs, and patterns of behaviour including basic assumptions and values which a particular group of people share and which ultimately influences how they see and interpret the world. Culture is a cognitive as well as a social phenomenon. As a cognitive phenomenon, it enables us to interpret the world (Knoblauch 2001Knoblauch, Hubert 2001 “Communication, Context and Culture: A Communicative Constructivist Approach to Intercultural Communication.” In Culture Communication: Analyses of Intercultural Situations, ed. by Aldo Di Luzio, Susanne Günthner, and Franca Orletti, 3–33. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. ). As a social phenomenon, culture includes all the valuations and systems of orientation that come into the communicative act. It is organised as a system of mental representations or beliefs which have become integral to the cognitive or social consciousness of a particular group of people over time. Zegarac (2000Zegarac, Vladimir 2000 “Culture and Communication.” In Culturally Speaking: Culture, Communication and Politeness Theory, ed. by Helen D. Spencer-Oatey 48–69. London: Continuum. , 66) explains culture as implicit beliefs stored in the form of mental structures called schemata, and these beliefs reflect a people’s “internalised values, inform their views and influence their actions.” Spencer-Oatey (2000Spencer-Oatey, Helen D. 2000 “Rapport Management: A Framework for Analysis.” In Culturally Speaking: Managing Rapport through Talk across Cultures, ed. by Helen D. Spencer-Oatey, 11–46. London: Continuum. , 4) describes these implicit beliefs as “deep-seated orientations to life.”

Within the Nigerian cultural context, one of such implicit beliefs or “deep-seated orientations to life” is the assumption that negative words have the potential to cause adverse consequences, especially for the speaker. To this extent, therefore, I argue that irony in the Nigerian context is essentially echoic and the echoed belief is this deeply entrenched disposition, so that a common example such as “what a lovely day” said in the midst of a stormy weather and torrential rain does not necessarily violate the maxim of truthfulness by saying what is believed to be false, or even echo a prior assertion or expectation that the weather would be fine. Rather, the motivation for the utterance is deeply rooted in a belief system that privileges a positive utterance in an unpleasant situation with the hope of preventing a negative outcome. This is the basis for the subset of ironic phenomena described in this study. Since irony does not exist in a vacuum (Bailin 2015Bailin, Alan 2015 “On the Characteristics of Verbal Irony.” Semiotica 204: 101–119. ), my purpose is to examine those sociocultural sensibilities, those systems of thought and ontological consciousness that give rise to ironic meaning in this context. For convenience, the communicative behaviours that are motivated by these cultural notions can be categorised into three related constructs, namely self-distancing, positive confession, and the imaginary enemy as victim. A tentative label for the resulting irony may be, for want of a better term, positive echoic irony, defined loosely as a communicative strategy by which a speaker activates a deep-seated cultural orientation that forbids being negative in an unpleasant situation, and in the process seeks to reverse the consequences of that situation by self-distancing, positive confession, or by invoking the imaginary enemy as a victim.

5.Materials and methods

This study is about the manner in which salient cultural notions mediate the use of verbal irony in the Nigerian context. Data for the study comprised, in the most part, observation and detailed ethnographic field notes taken within the last five years in contexts in which utterances occurred naturally. These were then tested among informants at the University of Benin to determine the prevalence and motivation of the ironic utterances within the Nigerian cultural context. Although informants were from diverse ethnic and linguistic backgrounds, discussions were carried out in English, which is the official language. Data sources also included the author’s intuitions and self-knowledge as a member of the speech community, personal interviews, and focus group discussions primarily aimed at identifying the prevalence and motivations for verbal irony in this context.

Besides this, 500 questionnaires were administered to a group of students and staff also from the University of Benin, using the convenient sampling method. This was meant to simply identify the motivation for the use of irony in this context, authenticate the ethnographic data, and in the process provide a better understanding of the phenomenon. 388 or 77.6% of the total number of questionnaires administered were found useable. The instruments were analysed using tables and simple percentages. The analyses of the demographic data revealed that 166 (38.2%) of the participants were male while 222 (51.2%) were female. Only forty-six (10.6%) of the participants did not indicate their gender. The age distribution of the respondents showed that 174 (40.1%) of the participants were between eighteen and twenty-five years old. This is followed by 142 (32.75%) of the participants that were between twenty-six and forty-three years old, while seventy (17%) were forty-four years old and above. Only forty-eight (11.1%) of the participants did not indicate their age. In terms of highest educational qualification, 225 (51.8%) of the participants were below degree level, while eighty-eight (20.3%) of the participants had a first degree. Participants with postgraduate qualifications jointly accounted for seventy-four (17%); that is, fifty-four (12.4%) for Masters, and twenty (4.6%) for Ph.D. In terms of religion, 408 (94%) of the participants were Christians, ten (2.3%) were Muslims, and four (0.9%) were neither Christians nor Muslims. Twelve or 2.8% of the participants did not indicate their religion. These demographic variables did not have any significant effect on the data. Although the study is based on relevance in terms of theoretical orientation, it attempts to modify the basic tenets of the echoic account in order to accommodate what is essentially cultural in the interpretation of verbal irony in the Nigerian context.

6.Data presentation and analysis

In this section, data samples of ironic utterances are presented under given cultural principles that embody the echoed idea. These principles include self-distancing, positive confession, and the imaginary enemy as victim. They are all related. Participants are fully anonymised.

7.Summary of findings and concluding remarks

The main contention of this study has been the motivation for verbal irony in the Nigerian socio-cultural context. Like the echoic interpretation of irony, this study considers it inadequate to think of irony simply as the opposite of what is said. In the context described in this study, irony originates from deep-seated cultural disposition and sensibilities. Irony is echoic in this sense because it always connects those norms that are entrenched in the culture – a culture that comprises a system of beliefs that forbids negativity in unpleasant situations.

The echoic interpretation has three distinctive features. It expresses an attitude which is usually to a thought; it has a normative bias which is evaluative or critical and it is marked by a special prosodic feature. This theoretical model is not fully applicable to all types of ironic utterances as we have seen, hence we agree with Gibbs (2007Gibbs, Raymond 2007 “Irony in Talks among Friends.” In Irony in Language and Thought: A Cognitive Science Reader, ed. by Raymond W. Gibbs Jr., and Herbert L. Colston, 339–360. New York: Erlbaum. , 356) that “irony is not a single category of figurative language, but includes a variety of types, each of which is motivated by slightly different cognitive, linguistic, and social factors, and conveys somewhat different pragmatic meanings.” From our data we can establish the fact that an ironic utterance does express an attitude to a thought – a belief, a hope, a wish or a norm-based expectation, but this is at a surface level; at a deeper level of representation, the thought that the ironic utterance echoes is usually a deep-seated cultural consciousness that privileges a positive attitude, and discourages the association of a negative idea, thought or misfortune with oneself. In interpersonal interaction, this is manifested when a speaker self-distances himself or herself from utterances or situations they find unpleasant or annoying, when they maintain a positive mental attitude or confess something positive in the face of danger, or when they reject a life-threatening situation by passing it on to an imaginary enemy. First, there is a situation which the speaker considers unpleasant, annoying or life-threatening. Next, an echoic response is activated from the unconscious, and then there is dissociation of oneself from the perceived consequences of the situation. Irony in this context therefore is echoic mainly to the extent that it connects to a cultural sensibility to which members of the socio-cultural community are oriented.

Irony is said to be both critical and evaluative. It is hardly used to praise. This idea is shared by most accounts of irony (Garmendia 2000Garmendia, Joana 2000 “Irony is Critical.” Pragmatics and Cognition 18: 397–421. ; Partington 2007Partington, Alan 2007 “Irony and the Reversal of Evaluation.” Journal of Pragmatics 39: 1547–1569. ; Gibbs 2012Gibbs, Raymond 2012 “Are Ironic Acts Deliberate?” Journal of Pragmatics 44: 104–115. ; Dynel 2013Dynel, Marta 2013 “Irony from a Neo-Gricean Perspective: On Untruthfulness and Evaluative Implicature.” Intercultural Pragmatics 10 (3): 403–431. ). In our data, the expectations to which the targets fail to measure up are criticised, at least at the surface level, but as we have shown, the most important idea is the motivation for the irony, which determines the meaning that is conveyed. In comprehending irony in the context described here, participants depend heavily on contextual features such as the incongruity observable in the interaction, less on facial expressions and kinetics, and perhaps not at all on prosodic features. In the absence of prosodic cues, the listener can intuitively activate that aspect of the culture that forbids the association of danger or misfortune with oneself to arrive at the ironic meaning with minimal processing effort.

The implication of this study is that verbal irony is a more complex phenomenon than previously thought, and for researchers in the relevance-theoretic tradition, there is a need to rethink the motivation for irony in human communication. Our study suggests the need to abandon the simplistic view of irony as a mere expression of attitude to a thought said to be manifested in the form of beliefs, hopes, wishes, and expectations that things will be fine. Also, researchers need to rethink the simplistic view that, generally, the ironic word must be negative for the entire expression to be regarded as ironic. Finally, looking at the uniqueness of irony in the Nigerian context, researchers may wish to interrogate the nature of irony in other African speech communities, and compare their findings with those of this present study. Such a study might provide a more robust understanding of this concept in African societies, and ultimately shed some light on its implication for intercultural communication.