ELSEVlER Lingua 110 (2000) 257-280 www.elsevier.nl/locate/lingua Irony: Negation, echo and metarepresentation* Carmen Curc6* Department of Applied Linguistics, CELE, UNAM. Circuit0 Interior s/n, Ciudad Universifaria, 04510 Mtkico DF, Mexico Received 15 June 1999; revised version 1 September 1999 zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedc Abstract There is a current debate on the nature of verbal irony. On one view, held by Sperber and Wilson (1981, 1986; Wilson and Sperber, 1992), verbal irony is a subtype of echoic use of language. On another zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFE view, advocated by Giora (1995, Giora and Fein, 1998), verbal irony is a form of indirect negation. This paper compares both approaches and looks at their predic- tions with regard to the cognitive abilities that the processing of verbal irony should demand. In particular, it concentrates on the degree of higher-order mental representations that inter- preters of verbal irony should be able to manipulate. The results of the analysis favour the framework proposed by Sperber and Wilson. 0 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Verbal irony; Meta-representation; Indirect negation; Echoic use; Theory of mind 1. Introduction The literature on irony and its interpretation is very extensive. In this paper I con- centrate on two current views on the pragmatic nature of verbal irony: one that sees irony as a subtype of echoic use of language (Sperber and Wilson, 1981,1986; Wil- son and Sperber, 1992), and one that suggests irony is a form of indirect negation (Giora, 1995). I contrast them looking both at their descriptive and their explanatory power. I offer some critical thoughts about the analysis of irony as negation, in par- ticular, with regard to the implications it would have for the processing of verbal * I am grateful to Marilyn Buck and an anonymous reviewer for their very valuable comments on a previous version of this paper. * E-mail: carmenc@servidor.unam.mx 037%2166/00/$ - see front matter 0 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. PII: SOO24-3841(99)00041-8