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This article aims to determine whether euphemistic dysphemisms and dysphemistic euphemisms, two concepts defined by Allan and Burridge (1991, 2006), can convey irony and banter, which are defined, among other linguists, by Leech (1983, 2014\). He argues that irony and banter are 'second-order strategies rooted in violations of the CP [Cooperative Principle] or the PP Politeness Principle], and working in contrary directions' (Leech, 2014: 100). There are many similarities in the definitions of X-phemisms and those of irony and banter: in the cases of irony and euphemistic dysphemisms, an apparently polite utterance is not interpreted as such, whereas in the cases of banter and dysphemistic euphemisms, an apparently impolite utterance is not. I use examples from American TV shows (House, M.D., Sex and the City, How I met Your Mother, The Big Bang Theory, Grey's Anatomy) to describe the underlying mechanisms of the functioning of these four devices. The results of the study show that dysphemistic euphemisms can convey banter but that euphemistic dysphemisms cannot convey irony, though they can sometimes convey banter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the conformation in discourse of a verbal exchange and its subsequent mediatised and legal ramifications. The event concerns an allegedly racist insult directed by high-profile English professional footballer John Terry towards another player, Anton Ferdinand, during a televised match in October 2011. The substance of Terry’s utterance, which included the noun phrase ‘fucking black cunt’, was found by a Chief Magistrate not to be a racist insult, although the fact that these actual words were framed within the utterance was not in dispute. The upshot of this ruling was that Terry was acquitted of a racially aggravated public order offence. A subsequent investigation by the regulatory commission of the English Football Association (FA) ruled, almost a year after the event, that Terry was guilty of racially abusing Ferdinand. Terry was banned for four matches and fined £220,000. It is our contention that this event, played out in legal rulings, social media and print and broadcast media, constitutes a complex web of linguistic structures and strategies in discourse, and as such lends itself well to analysis with a broad range of tools from pragmatics, discourse analysis and cognitive linguistics. Among other things, such an analysis can help explain the seemingly anomalous – even contradictory – position adopted in the legal ruling with regard to the speech act status of ‘fucking black cunt’; namely, that the racist content of the utterance was not contested but that the speaker was found not to have issued a racist insult. Over its course, the article addresses this broader issue by making reference to the systemic-functional interpersonal function of language, particularly to the concepts of modality, polarity and modalisation. It also draws on models of verbal irony from linguistic pragmatics, notably from the theory of irony as echoic mention. Furthermore, the article makes use of the cognitive-linguistic framework Text World Theory to examine the discourse positions occupied by key actors and adapts, from cognitive poetics, the theory of mind-modelling to explore the conceptual means through which these actors discursively negotiate the event. It is argued that the pragmatic and cognitive strategies that frame the entire incident go a long way towards mitigating the impact of so ostensibly stark an act of racial abuse. Moreover, it is suggested here that the reconciliation of Terry’s action was a result of the confluence of strategies of discourse with relations of power as embodied by the media, the law and perceptions of nationhood embraced by contemporary football culture. It is further proposed that the outcome of this episode, where the FA was put in the spotlight, and where both the conflict and its key antagonists were ‘intranational’, was strongly impelled by the institution of English football and its governing body both to reproduce and maintain social, cultural and ethnic cohesion and to avoid any sense that the event featured a discernible ‘out-group’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper considers what light experimental work on the development of irony comprehension can shed on the relation between echoic and pretence accounts of irony, and how theoretical debates about the nature of irony might suggest fruitful directions for future developmental research. After surveying the results of developmental studies of three distinctive features of verbal irony – the expression of a characteristic attitude, the normative bias in the uses of irony and the ‘ironical tone of voice’ – it considers how echoic and pretence accounts of irony might explain these results. On the theoretical side, it argues that echoing and pretence are distinct mechanisms which can be used independently of each other, and that verbal irony necessarily involves echoic use, but does not necessarily involve pretence. On the experimental side, it argues that a range of disparate phenomena including hyperbole, jocularity, understatement and rhetorical questions, which are generally treated as forms of irony in the developmental literature, display none of the distinctive features of irony in most of their uses, and are not inherently ironical. However, these phenomena are worth investigating in their own right, and new theoretical accounts and experimental paradigms are needed to prise them apart. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]