M. T. Cicero and H. P. Grice on "implicatura"

Speranza

Traditional accounts of irony work via reference to figurative meaning.

 

These are rhetorical definitions of irony formulated by Cicero and Quintilian.

 

In short, irony was identified as a trope that means the opposite of what it says.

 

Cicero distinguished this type of irony from another one which says something merely DIFFERENT from what it means.

 

Quintilian introduced a moralistic definition in which irony is admonishment through false praise and praise through false admonishment (cf. Knox 1973:25).

 

A problem with these short definitions can bee seen when looking at the sentence (1), which is uttered during a downpour.

(1) What lovely weather

A theory holding that the main feature of irony is that it conveys the opposite of what it says overlooks that in the absence of a distinctive intonation, only a certain context can make this utterance ironic. Only if the hearer knows that the speaker’s utterance is false (for example, speaker and hearer are standing in the rain together) or if the hearer knows about the speaker’s beliefs (they are on the phone, and the hearer must know that the speaker does not think the weather is nice since it is raining in his city) is it possible that the utterance (1) is recognized as ironic. Thus, any theory of irony that will not take the context into account must fail.

 

Grice has claimed that the figurative meaning is not semantic but pragmatic in nature. He has proposed that ironic utterances flout the first maxim of quality, thus producing the conversational implicature that the speaker means the opposite of what he says. The sentence ‘Today, we have lovely weather’ would be ironic when it’s raining heavily since the speaker utters something that is obviously false. The difference between the traditional and Grice’s theory of irony is merely the quality of the substitution that is made. While traditional theories claim that the substitution is semantic, Grice claims that it is solely pragmatic: It consists of a special kind of conversational implicature in which the first maxim of quality if flouted (cf. Lapp 1995:59ff.). The problem with Grice’s theory is that it does not get away from figurative meaning. Why does it not get away from figurative meaning? One reason is that figurative meanings are hard to define. Since almost every utterance is ambiguous, it should be even harder to find the figurative meaning, even if we take the disambiguating function of context into account.

One problem is that Grice must claim that irony conveys something

in additionto the literal sense, whereas it in factsubstitutesone meaning for the literal one. In other words, the notion of irony seems hardly reconcilable with the concept of implicature, unless this concept is seriously distorted. Another shortcoming of Grice’s theory is that it cannot explain the ironic nature of a sentence like (2) It seems to be raining [it is heavily raining]

 

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The meaning of the sentence is hardly the opposite of what it says. And yet, we feel compelled to call it ironic. And what would be the opposite meaning of sentence (3), uttered under the same circumstances as the previous utterances? (3) Did you remember to water the flowers? [it is heavily raining]

 

The fact that our question cannot be answered points to a significant deficit in both the semantic and Grice’s pragmatic account of irony. Irony may not only be a case where the first maxim of quality is flouted, but it may involve understatement, inappropriateness or irrelevance.