The irony is a 'hidden smile'.
In irony subjectivity lies in the evaluation of the phenomenon. The essence of irony consists in the foregrounding not of the logical but of the evaluative meaning.
Irony thus is a stylistic device in which the contextual evaluative meaning of a word is directly opposite to its dictionary meaning. The context is arranged in such a way that the qualifying word in irony reverses the direction of the evaluation and a positive meaning is understood as a negative one and (much-much rare) vice versa, e.g. “She turned with the sweet smile of an alligator”. The word ”sweet” reverse their positive meaning into the negative one due to the context. Irony does not exist outside the context.
There are two types of irony: verbal and sustained.
Newspaper Genres
Functional Styles
Research topics
Two Basic Fields of Stylistics
