The Pragmatics of Irony in Everyday Talk Irony is traditionally viewed as a special type of figurative language that requires special

mental processes to be understood. I will argue against this view and suggest instead that irony has important pragmatic consequences in everyday talk and writing precisely because people conceptualize of many ideas and events in ironic terms. I shall discuss various kinds of empirical research that provides support for a complex pragmatic theory of irony understanding. Moreover, contemporary research in developmental and cognitive psychology lends support to the idea that irony requires certain metarepresentational abilities that distinguish irony understanding from metaphor comprehension.