Full Title: The Figure of Irony Revisited

Date: 04-Oct-2025 - 05-Oct-2025
Location: Online, Greece
Contact Person: Angeliki Athanasiadou
Meeting Email: [email protected]

Linguistic Field(s): Cognitive Science; Pragmatics; Psycholinguistics; Semantics

Call Deadline: 31-Aug-2025

First Call for Papers:

Following previous successful theme sessions in ICLC 13 and ICLC 14, and publications of selected papers in Irony in Language Use and Communication 2017 (A. Athanasiadou and H. Colston (Eds.), J. Benjamins FTL1, and The Diversity of Irony 2020 (A. Athanasiadou and H. Colston (Eds.), CLR 65 Mouton de Gruyter, the figure of irony is revisited in its diversity as a fundamental and multifaceted mechanism.

Researchers working on irony might investigate its multifaceted character in a variety of languages, as well as on topics including, though not limited to, those below:
- production and interpretation of irony;
- verbal and/or situational irony;
- types of irony: Socratic irony, dramatic irony, irony of fate, each one influencing its study in linguistics and psycholinguistics; also irony and pragmatic functions in various sociocultural contexts, like bitter irony, polite irony(?), solidarity irony,…;
- approaches to verbal irony (pretense, echoic accounts, relevant inappropriateness, allusional pretense, bicoherence, contrast, …);
- irony and constructions: are there entities usually connected to irony? are there constructions favored in irony production and/or in response to irony?
- irony and humor; irony and parody; irony and sarcasm: what is the distinctive line between them?
- verbal irony may combine with metaphor, metonymy, simile, hyperbole, understatement, rhetorical questions and many others, for a variety of practices such as political/extremist/racist, …. speech;
- irony and multimodality in advertising, political cartoons, comics, animation, newspapers, TV commercials, co-speech or stand-alone gesture, … or in any social, cultural, political or ideological background;
- irony clustering in conversations and/or discourses;
- irony framing;
- irony priming.

Proposals for abstracts (not more than 300 words) are encouraged both descriptive and/or theoretical, on the figure of irony that could account for its broader picture in conceptualization, expression and interpretation.
Presentations will be no longer than 15 min.

There is no registration fee.

Submit the abstract by August 31st to [email protected], details of the online platform will follow.
For further inquiries contact [email protected]