Irony and relevance: A reply to Seto, Hamamoto and Yamanashi Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson CREA, Ecole Polytechnique and University College London 1. Introduction The papers by Professors Seto, Hamamoto and Yamanashi make a valuable con- tribution to the analysis of verbal irony, both practical and theoretical. We would like to thank them for their positive comments on the relevance-theoretic ac- count, and for the interesting questions they raise. In particular, we are grateful to Hamamoto for his analysis of the relations between verbal and situational irony (based on the writings of Professor Kawakami), to Seto for his insightful discus- sion of a variety of markers of echoic use, and to Yamanashi for drawing atten- tion to many problems with standard approaches to irony (for example, the fact that the interaction between metaphor and irony is incompatible with standard approaches). In this brief reply, we will look at three main issues. First, is verbal irony necessarily echoic? Should a category of non-echoic irony be recognised, as Seto and Hamamoto propose? Second, is there a clear-cut boundary between ironical and non-ironical utterances, or are there borderline cases, as Yamanashi sug- gests? Third, can the relevance-theoretic account of irony shed light on a range of more complex cases, including those discussed by Hamamoto? We will end with some more general reflections on whether irony is a natural kind. 2. Must irony be echoic? Hamamoto and Seto see what Hamamoto calls the "vagueness of the echoed source" in many examples as a problem for our account. Nonetheless, we would like to defend the view that verbal irony is necessarily echoic.