As if irony was in stock

Abstract

The linguistic treatment of verbal irony1 has more often than not focused on novel, ad hoc ironies. Research in the last decade, however, suggests that there is a considerable number of utterances that are either schematic or lexically filled and interpreted as ironic by convention. By analyzing three of these, i.e. Tell me about it, XP pro BE not (A Michelangelo he is not) and stand-alone insubordinate as if (As if anyone could pronounce that), the present paper will show that these expressions are best analyzed as constructions (Goldberg 1995, 2006). The paper will further show that the Viewpoint account of irony (Dancygier 2017; Tobin & Israel 2012) describes the data at hand most adequately.