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

Chapter 9
Irony as counter positioning

Reader comments on the EU migrant crisis

 | Masaryk University, Brno
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
Published online: 25 April 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lal.30.09cho
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