Explicit Verbal Irony and Means of Marking It in Journalistic Style of the Serbian and Croatian Languages

The research topic of this paper is intentional explicit verbal irony, with a particular emphasis on determining the means of its marking in the journalistic style of stand-ard Croatian and Serbian language. The first part of the paper presents the problem of providing a general definition of verbal irony, its characteristics and typology with regard to the means and media of its expression. The main part of the paper deals with determining irony markers in Serbian and Croatian by using content analysis of the corpus which comprises magazine articles in the respective languages. The selec-tion of such a corpus is based on the assumption that the direction of the discourse towards a wide, and to the locutor unfamiliar audience (which s/he as an author does not make direct contact to) requires a more explicit verbal marking of irony than it is the case in a direct speech event, which opens the possibility of its marking through speech intonation, mimics, body language and other nonverbal means. The final part provides a conclusion about the results of the conducted research and about the ap-plicability of the current interpretations of verbal irony in the corpus analysis. 1. Theoretical approaches to verbal iron