Peirce's semiotic approach to irony

As someone famously said, irony is usually regarded as "saying what you mean without meaning what you say. "But how exactly this can be achieved is not easy to answer. More precisely, this characterization applies to verbal irony. Verbal irony has classically been conceived of as the act of saying something and meaning the opposite.But some forms of irony usually recognized are not verbal; they include situational irony and dramatic irony; situational irony is not intentional, in the sense that something happens that is the opposite of what might be expectedand the result has a negative character (irony of fate). Dramatic irony, according to the Oxford Dictionary, is "(a) literary technique, originally used in Greek tragedy, by which the full significance of a character's words or actions is clear to the audience or reader although unknown to the character." Well-known examples include Shakespeare's tragedies and Oedipus' story (the audience knows, while Oedipus does not, that he himself is the murderer he is seeking). Other forms of irony that are often mentioned are Socratic irony and Romantic irony.Fil: Vargas, Evelyn. Universidad Nacional de La Plata. Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias de la Educación. Instituto de Investigaciones en Humanidades y Ciencias Sociales (UNLP-CONICET); Argentina