Abstract

Scholars addressing verbal irony from linguistic, psychological and philosophical perspectives have developed a set of mechanisms presumed to underlie verbal irony comprehension and usage, and possibly situational irony as well. Similar and overlapping features of these mechanisms have also been distilled by overarching accounts attempting to explain verbal irony’s operation in interlocutors. Whether based on necessary conditions, families of contributor components, functional principles or embodied underpinnings, these narrower and umbrella accounts have been presented as if encompassing verbal irony in its presumed generic pseudo-universal form.A related line of work has begun to identify particularized mechanisms in different languages that afford verbal irony performance and comprehension in interesting ways perhaps unique to those languages. Among these are the BEI Construction in Chinese, the system of Honorifics in Japanese, and Verum Focus-Inducing Fronting in Spanish.It is unclear, however, how these two literatures align. Can work identifying how verbal irony functions more generically account for emerging mechanisms housed within specific languages? Moreover, relatively little work has documented and deconstructed how wide varieties of different languages might achieve verbal irony, relative to the number of languages currently in usage globally.This paper outlines both the accounts of verbal irony comprehension/usage proposed as applicable to ironic language per se, as well as the particularized mechanisms from individual languages. An assessment of how the individualized language mechanisms align with the broader accounts is provided, and suggestions for future work to further evaluate this alignment are discussed.