Irony as a semantico-rhetorical means of evaluation in a socio-political editorial

The subject of the present study is the persuasive function of irony in a special type of media discourse called socio-political editorial. The use of irony enables the journalist to establish the axiological domain of editorial in order to reinforce the information content and manipulate the readers’ opinions. Therefore, the main aim of the paper is to describe the problem of language manipulation in verbal irony considered by the author as one of semantico-rhetorical means of evaluation. The analyzed articles were culled from selected web pages of French journals and magazines (2005-2008) treating about two types of social reforms and the urban violence in French suburbs