Some Proposals to Cope with Forms of Irony Typically Found in Literary Texts from a

Abstract: The study of irony has always been a field of interest for diverse disciplines. Whereas irony had been traditionally explained as a contrast between what was said and what was meant, more recent, pragmatically-oriented studies have adopted a wider perspective, by considering aspects like the speaker’s attitude, intention or context. Among these approaches, relevance theory has proposed an ostensive-inferential approach to communication, whereby the addressee seeks to infer the speaker’s intention. Such an approach seems to be appropriate for the study of irony, and in fact, irony has been a hotly-debated issue within the relevance-theoretical framework (Sperber and Wilson 1981, 1978), even before the model as such (Sperber and Wilson 1986/95) was explicitly fleshed out. Moreover, the proposals made reach very recent times (for instance, Wilson, 2006). In one of the contributions by Sperber and Wilson (1998), they claimed that irony was not a natural kind, and enhanced the echoic nature of verbal irony. A distinction between ostensive and non-ostensive forms of irony was put forward. Precisely, among the latter, Sperber and Wilson gave as instances forms such as dramatic irony, or irony of fate