Irony as a characteristic feature of journalists’ speech behaviour

This article deals with studying the characteristic features of ironic statements functioning in the speech behaviour of German journalists. The article identifies the strategic aspects of ironic statements in the communicative space of the German-language media discourse. The article reveals the phenomenon of irony from the point of view of the pragmalinguistic approach. The authors analyze the speech behaviour of German journalists according to the speech strategy “the formation of an ironic meaning in the statement”. The tactics by which this strategy is realized in the newspaper texts are discussed in detail. The study covers various newspaper genres and includes the analysis of examples with irony in the journalists’ articles which are particularly characterized by an ironic presentation. Based on the above, it is concluded that irony can be a characteristic feature of journalists’ speech behaviour